


the whisper system

by misandrywitch



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: High School, Lost Decade, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Road Trips, Time Skips, we're doing it all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2020-11-26 07:46:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20926634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: “Thanks for bringing me here,” Michael says. Before he loses the nerve he lays down too, his jean jacket rustling against the blankets that are permanent inhabitants of the pickup.“You’re welcome,” Alex says. “I mean, I said I would.”Michael wants to look at him but doesn’t risk it. “Wasn’t sure if you remembered that.”OR -five places michael & alex went together, and one they didn't.





	1. Roswell - 2008

**Author's Note:**

> the title of this monster is from 'the long and short of it' by richard siken. this part: 
> 
> "I was shooting my mouth off and you called me on it and yes, it’s been the plan all along, my great invention, a place for all these voices to land, the airport of someone else’s listening."
> 
> this was meant to be a series of vignettes. it's something a lot longer than that. hope you like it.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roswell - 2008

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i reformatted this bad boy to actually exist in 7 chapters rather than one huge block of text SO nothin new just reorganized. enjoy xoxo
> 
> i'm leescoresbies.tumblr.com

People who make promises to Michael Guerin don’t typically keep them. 

That’s a hard lesson he learns early. It’s true when promises are spoken, and true when they’re assumptions. He spends a lot of time in the years that he’s sixteen, seventeen, driving out somewhere with a good view of an inky black sky and the slice of the solar system visible from his location. If you shout loud enough, eventually somebody has to shout back - at the very least to tell you to shut the hell up. But that doesn’t happen. A hard lesson he learns, early. 

And the exception kind of just prove the rule.

It’s a Saturday. And Michael’s goals are less like a promise and more like an open-ended question. 

The Evanses are playing happy family together, a dinner reservation and a photographic moment. Even if they weren’t, Isobel would be off doing whatever mysterious teenage girl things Isobel does with her time, which rarely involves the two of them. And as much as Michael’s enjoying poring over road maps with Max, plotting their future travels with a slide rule and a grin, he’s secured much better plans for this particular hot Saturday afternoon in very late April. Max had apologized, and Michael had pretended to be chagrined and then he’d driven his truck to the sun-baked skate yard behind the highschool and gone lurking. 

Big plans are big plans, but they don’t compare to Alex Manes on a skateboard with his headphones on. 

And Michael has an invitation, or something close to it. An aside - “No, I’m not working. If anyone’s looking for me, I’ll probably be avoiding the jocks in this stupid city at the skate park. Probably.” 

There’s a pattern to the sound of it, almost like a melody. A slide, a swish, a moment of airborn silence and then the clatter of the wheels. Alex’s dark head appears first over the concrete rim of the park, then his hand, four wheels and his feet. He turns in the air. Somewhere at the arc of his turn he sees Michael; lands, stumbles but doesn’t fall, and then he’s down and below him and speeding up the other side. Michael likes the synchronicity of it, close and then away and then back and then away again. It’s what he and Alex are doing, in a way. Close and then away, with a stomach-turning drop into something in the middle. 

Maybe Michael’s an idiot for being an optimist. But he did fall out of the sky and make it out alive, so he deserves to be, for once. 

Michael walks along the edge of the park, listening to the pattern of Alex’s skateboard wheels on the concrete. Alex’s bag, black canvas with round plastic pins, is resting at the edge of the basketball hoop on the far side. His guitar, in its case, is there too. Nobody else is around. 

It’s out of tune again, Alex’s guitar. Michael carries it back to his truck so he can sit on the tailgate, pulls it into its lap and adjusts pegs by ear. He flips through some classics, a few he’s still trying to get his fingers around. The world pulls away into a point of concentration, so he doesn’t even notice that the sound of Alex’s skateboard has stopped. 

“I kinda thought you’d stop stealing my stuff,” a voice snaps Michael out of that concentration, “now that you’ve got your own guitar.” 

“That’s what it was?” Michael squints into the sun. Alex, skateboard over his shoulder, looks down at him. The liner under his eyes is smudged and uneven. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Sure. Just a ploy to get you to keep your hands to yourself.” 

“I like yours better.” 

“Then at least play something I know the words to,” Alex says, wrinkling his nose against the sun. Michael picks out the chords to “Nothing Else Matters,” and is rewarded with Alex’s middle finger. 

“Watch it, Manes,” he says, hits a sour chord and adjusts, “hurt my feelings and me and my truck and the weed in my truck will drive off somewhere else.” 

“I’d miss the truck,” Alex says, deadpan. Michael laughs. 

“It’s in a shoebox under the passenger seat,” he says, and Alex rolls his eyes and opens the side door. “Along with my porn,” Michael calls, “and a handgun!” 

“Not suspicious at all.” Alex returns holding a plastic bag, and Michael is further rewarded when he hops into the tailgate. The heel of his boot bounces off the tire with a thunk. “Nobody would accuse you of delinquency. Just look at you.” 

“There’s a joint in there, I rolled it already.” 

“I can roll a joint on my own, Guerin.” Alex takes the one Michael had rolled that morning out anyway and holds it between two fingers to put the plastic bag underneath one of the blankets in the back of the truck. 

Michael gasps. “You’re not supposed to know what a drug is. You’re a military brat.” 

Alex sticks the joint in his mouth, thumbs the lighter, and glares. “Maria taught me how to roll them,” he says. “Her joints are tidier than yours too.” 

Michael had first noticed Alex because of his contrariness. He’d been aware of him distantly as the topic of the kind of gossip Michael himself is often the topic of, just a different flavor. But he’d really looked because of Alex’s commitment to throwing back what people throw at him, sometimes blunt and sometimes underhanded and always a little more clever than anyone else around him. 

He’d kept looking because of how Alex follows that up with a hidden, true moment of honesty. Blink and you miss it. Michael doesn’t blink, much. 

He takes the joint from Alex’s fingers. It’s kind of skunky, but it’s what he’s got. 

“You just hanging around out here waiting for someone to drive by?” Michael pretends to leer. “Wanna buy some weed, kid?” 

“Better than being at home,” Alex says. “I’m supposed to be at Liz’s but she and her dad and Rosa got into something this morning and I steered clear. I’ll call her later, I guess. Don’t know.” 

“Big kids don’t have curfews, Manes.” Michael’s got nothing but the truck, and the occasional social services appointment. And Max and Isobel. He wants to think they do their best. 

“More like a jailer. My brother was home on leave for a month and it was better but now it’s shitty again. I have a few hours until he’ll throw a fit. Probably.” 

Michael doesn’t ask who Alex is referring to. He has a guess. He also has the clear estimation that if he were to bring the topic up directly, Alex would run for the hills. 

“Well, I for one have homework,” he says, speaking nasally into his nose. Alex snorts. 

“Pretty sure you don’t have to study.” 

Michael doesn’t. He likes to though, when the topic is interesting. The school library’s got a limited stockpile of books on astrophysics, and he’s started ordering them from university bookstores, photocopying the pages, and then returning them for his money back. 

“English essay’s not gonna write itself, though.” It could, if he made a pen walk the words across the page. Quite an image. 

“Stupid essay,” Alex says. His boot bounces on the tire again. “Who cares about Jane Austen, anyway? I can count the weeks left in this sadistic social experiment on my hands and then I’m never thinking about essays or Austen or football or this town ever again.” 

“Cheers to that.” Michael can see the weeks like the end of the finish line. Playacting the teenagers on television, legal status questionable even though social services has largely stopped trying to enforce his staying in one place. “You’re not gonna ask about my plans, are you?”

“Do I look like a guidance counselor to you?”

“You should. I got some.” 

“What are your plans after graduation, Guerin?” Alex pitches his voice into something mocking. 

“I’m gonna get my diploma,” Michael says firmly, breathing smoke towards the sky, “I’m gonna legally become my own person and not a ward of the state of New Mexico, I’m gonna get into a car and I’m gonna go.” 

“Go where?” Michael is looking skyward and he’s aware that Alex is looking at him. He turns his face back in Alex’s directly and Alex looks away, chews his thumbnail. 

“Doesn’t matter,” Michael says. “Anywhere. Max and I are gonna go on a road trip together after graduation. We’ve got some ideas.”

“It’s nice to have somebody who wants to do that with you.” 

“Don’t you have, like, a bunch of brothers?” They way they’re talked about around town Michael always imagines an army of them, endless identical tall and handsome men all named Manes. 

“They’re all way old,” Alex scoffs, “and boring. They just do what they’re told. Hunter’s, like, practically an old man now. Flint was alright for a while, but he joined up and now all he talks about is ballistics. It’s stupid. The military is stupid.” 

Michael laughs, and smoke goes down his throat. “Hunter?” he says. “And Flint?” 

“Yeah, I think Mom intervened for me to land Alexander. I got lucky. Coulda been Forrest. Or Sniper.”

“You look like a Sniper.” 

“Fuck you,” Alex says. He shoves Michael’s shoulder, and Michael shoves back, and they scuffle for a second until Alex knocks him off the tailgate and pumps a fist in the air. Michael lands on his feet in the dust. He touches his own elbow, where Alex’s determined fingers had been a moment ago. 

“That’s what I want,” Alex says after a second. He brushes dust off of his knees, mostly smearing it around on black denim. 

Michael feels himself flush, suddenly, at the innuendo. Anyone else he might crack the joke - “Fuck me? You only have to ask?” - but Alex would probably read that as a jab in his direction. And it’s not a laughing matter, really. 

“Just take off,” Alex clarifies. “It’s stupid but I’ve thought about it.”

“It’s not stupid.” 

“It is,” Alex shrugs, his eyebrows turning downward. “I mean, there’s things I’m expected to do. Dad’s obsessed with that. It’s all he talks about. Like he’s got this deadline down for me to grow up and stop being myself and become a proper Manes man.” 

“Who says shit like that?” Michael shakes his head. He holds the joint out. “Go on. You need this more than me.” 

Alex takes it. He inhales, and Michael watches the smoke caught inside his mouth for a moment before he releases it, and shivers. “What I really want to do is buy a bus ticket and take my guitar and go. Pick a direction, right? See where I land. I’ll write songs about it. I want to make music.” 

Michael imagines Alex’s clever fingers on guitar strings. Alex’s clear face caught under stage lights. It would be natural, and right. 

“Like where?” 

“Anywhere,” Alex says. “Everywhere. I want to see the whole country.” 

“Maybe we’ll cross paths,” Michael says, caught in the hypothetical. “You wherever you go, and me and Max in the truck. Criss-cross each other all over the States.” 

“Where are you going first?”

“Santa Fe,” Michael says decisively. It’s a fixed point in his head. “And then Colorado. Pagosa Springs, Telluride. We’re gonna camp. See Denver.”

“I’d do Denver,” Alex nods. “See a concert.”

“Eat a Rocky Mountain oyster.”

“Don’t be sick. Where next?” 

“West. I wanna see the ocean. Max wants to go to San Francisco but I want to drive up the California coast and into Oregon.” 

“Then find me in L.A.,” Alex says. “I could kick it in L.A.” 

“You’d have to wear less black, man. It’s hot there.” 

“Well fine,” Alex screws up his eyes, the joint burning idly between his fingers. “Then you’ll have to catch up with me somewhere else. Somewhere like, God I don’t know, like Boise.” 

“What the hell is in Boise?” Michael can’t even imagine where that is on a map. Central somewhere, vegetables and hardworking folks with good strong legs, or something. 

“No idea,” Alex says. “That’s the point. Don’t know anybody in Boise. I could be anybody, in Boise. Could tell them I’m a rockstar if I dressed right.” 

“Why settle there? Tell ‘em you’re Tony Hawk. Or - an extreme unicyclist.” 

“The guy who names all the colors in Crayola crayons.” 

“Or a real space alien.” Michael can’t help himself. “Oh yeah, real space alien from Roswell, New Mexico.”

“Yeah right.” Alex rolls his eyes. “Now you’re going too far.” 

“I’ll tell it to everybody I see. That guy with the guitar? Alien. Yeah, I didn’t know they made aliens that look like that either.” 

Michael’s starting to feel the weed, a warmth around the edges of his brain. Maybe Alex is too because he doesn’t say anything in response to that. He does blink though, and Michael can see how his lashes are dark, and darker along the edge of the liner around his eyes. See the sweat gathered right at his hairline because of the sun, and how the light refracts off the silver stud in his ear. 

“You ever been to the Grand Canyon?” Alex asks. 

“Huh?” Michael shakes his head. “No.” 

“Can’t go on a road trip and not end up at the Grand Canyon. Especially if you’ve never been.” Alex says this with perfect certainty. 

“Thanks for the expert advice,” Michael says. Suddenly bold, he continues, “I mean, since I’ve never been I’ll need someone to show me around.” 

“It’s a National Park, Guerin. They have park rangers and tour guides.” 

“Oh, sure. You see me hanging out with a tour guide? They’re gonna think I’m there to rob old ladies.”

Alex laughs. “Maybe,” he says, and Michael hears his voice as tentative, suddenly soft, “maybe I’ll meet you there. It would be a nice place to show to somebody.” 

There’s an expression on his face that Michael’s seen once before. Across the frets of a guitar. Alex’s mouth had gone soft and his eyes focused and Michael had been overwhelmed by want and the implications of that, the consequences. 

Sexuality panic, or whatever the rolling wave of nerves and inspiration that’s been turning Michael upside down, is supposed to inspire complicated teenaged angst. For Michael, the sudden, sharp realization of meaning behind looking at Alex Manes and feeling the spark of something he’d felt at half strength with half a dozen girls, didn’t hurt. It was a relief, really. He’s not sure if it’s something innate, something individual, or just Alex. There’s no natural way to ask the question to anyone else - “Hey Max, what are your feelings on men? Like, of a sexual nature?” was a hysterical prospect, and Isobel would eat him for lunch. 

The weekend Michael purchased his truck he’d drive it halfway across the state just to do it, slamming his foot on the gas pedal with all the windows down. Going so fast tears had blown up into his eyes and then been whisked away, he’d felt elated and alive and wild with it. Falling for Alex Manes was kind of like that; a shuddering jerk, a moment of sheer terror, and then just the elation and the wind blowing the tears out of his eyes, thirty miles over the speed limit. 

It wasn’t the consequences of Alex being a boy that had made Michael turn away, the night in the shed. More the consequences of it being Alex. 

Alex blinks, turns his head and the moment’s broken. Michael’s heart is hammering. “Well now you gotta promise,” he says, to say something. 

“Sure,” Alex’s mouth twists at the corner. “Yeah, sure. I promise.” 


	2. Santa Fe - 2008

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Santa Fe - 2008

Alex doesn’t speak to him until after Rosa Ortecho’s funeral. 

But to be fair, Michael doesn’t really speak to anybody. He drifts through the days in a haze, his hand wrapped up in gauze and the pain a constant shadow. Max is mired in guilt, Isobel in fear. Michael can’t get his head above water.

Alex is a shadow too. There’s a violent purple bruise on his face underneath his chin and his shoulders turn themselves inward, an automatic defense. Michael’s eyes seek his face automatically, and Alex looks back, then looks away, then back again. 

So Michael stops short when, two days after Rosa Ortecho’s funeral, he walks out to his truck outside the school to find Alex sitting on the asphalt with his back against the wheel. 

They stare at each other. 

“I probably shouldn’t be talking to you,” Alex says, stiff, “I mean, if anybody sees - I just - “ he frowns down at his feet. Michael can see a second bruise along the back of his hairline. Fingers. “Needed to see if you’re okay.” 

Michael crouches so they’re both caught in the truck’s shadow, a gossamer sanctuary from the early June heat. He knows that, up close, he looks wrecked and unsteady, the poster boy for growing up rough with no family. Everything everybody’s ever said about him, unwashed hair and dirt ground into the elbows of his jacket. Alex looks tidier, arranged around straight lines. His face is bare. That looks wrong too. 

“Don’t lose any sleep over me,” Michael says automatically. He hasn’t slept in days, exactly, has dozed fitfully and been interrupted with iteration of a burning car, Isobel’s twisted face, Alex in pain, the fall of the hammer. 

Alex’s brow creases. Michael wants to put his fingers there, stop the pain from spreading any further. 

“Don’t say that,” he snaps out. “Don’t, don’t look at me, don’t - “ 

Michael drops his head. Lets it hang there like a stone, heavy. He could drop into sleep there, topple forward so his forehead falls into Alex’s lap. 

“I didn’t mean that,” Alex says softly. “I just - “ 

He touches Michael’s chin, softly. Michael lifts his head up. It’s so soft he could have missed it, but he didn’t. 

“Rough weekend,” Michael says, because he has to say something. 

“You are so stupid,” Alex says. He laughs a little shakily. 

“You working later?” 

“I take a break at eight.”

“Can I - “

“Yeah, yeah. Be careful.” 

Alex stands, brushes dirt off his knees. 

“See you, Guerin,” he says casually, his sudden indifference well-timed to footsteps behind them; the track team, very late season practice. 

“See you,” Michael calls. 

Several hours later, he crowds Alex up against the employee breakroom door in the empty museum and kisses him, ignores the pain in his hand to cling to his collar, holds Alex at the waist when his breath catches. He lets himself relax into it, just for a moment. Long enough to forget, just for a moment. When Alex unbuckles his belt he closes his eyes and sees the press of artificial stars against his lids until that fades into the real ones, shapes and symbols Michael doesn’t recognize. 

The world spins like that towards summer. He and Max don’t speak, except about Isobel. He and Isobel talk about nothing. He and Alex grasp at straws. 

He chugs acetone, brushes his teeth and then meets Alex at the end of his street in the early morning for something that lasts long the length of a drive, a fumbling contact over the steering wheel. They drive out of town fifteen miles where nobody else is around and the wind whips the side of Michael’s truck, and the action of hand over hand steams the windows.

They’re moments, fragments, and they’re so fast and so precious they could slide right through Michael’s fingers. 

And then Alex shows up at his truck, in the junkyard. 

Two weeks after Michael had slept him for the first time - had watched Isobel murder somebody - had rearranged the arc of his entire life. It’s still happening and Michael’s powerless to stop it, the arc of anything he wanted or dreamed or imagined slipping away. What had he wanted? A full ride, the kind of future that might teach someone I told you so, Alex Manes. All in the rearview mirror now. 

But Alex shows up at the junkyard where Michael’s parked his truck, very early on a Saturday morning. Michael, awoken early by the early morning summer sun, can’t quite add those things up in his head. He just blinks at him

“Whose car is that?” 

Alex glances behind him. In a band t-shirt and jeans, he looks like he’s out of a uniform. “Mimi’s,” he says. “I slept over at Maria’s last night. What are you doing? Today?”

Michael doesn’t know. Watching. Waiting. Going nowhere. “Hell if I know. What are you doing here?” 

“Got gas in your truck?” 

“It’s full up. You wanna go for a ride?” 

Alex isn’t looking at him. Without the shadow of liner around his eyes he looks older and younger at once, his brow distinguished and his mouth uncertain. 

“I just need to get out of here,” Alex says. His lips barely move. 

Michael opens his mouth. He wants to say something reassuring, even something romantic. His mouth moves first and idiocy falls out of it. “You gonna suffer house arrest for that?” 

Alex’s face shutters, like someone turning a lock. Michael has seen him do that before when certain subjects get broached, but never in Michael’s direction. 

“Never mind,” he says, turning away. “Forget it.” One dark eyebrow catches the light as he turns and he’s all unfamiliar lines and angles. 

Michael catches his elbow, at a loss for next moves beyond the physical. He’s so rarely at a loss for words and Alex does it to him so well. 

“I’m not saying no,” he says, fast, “I just don’t want you in a world of hurt ‘cause of me.” 

The lock unturns. Alex’s face crumples, for a moment. 

“He’s out of the country,” he says. Michael doesn’t have to clarify who he is. “Until Tuesday. Don’t worry about me. I just can’t be in that house, I can’t - “ his words cut off sharply, even as something strange and uncertain and almost hopeful rises in Michael’s stomach. 

People are dead. He can’t look Max in the eye, and Isobel is so icy and intense it’s frightening. And there isn’t anyone else. Every other person on the planet is superficial - except for Alex. 

“Where we going?” Michael asks. 

“I don’t care. Anywhere.” Alex releases his elbows, shrugs one shoulder. When he does that, he squints his eye up, and the corner of his mouth too. A full-body shrug. Michael likes that he can identify that as a mannerism of his. 

“I’m kinda broke.” Michael’s always broke. 

“I got money. I mean, some.” 

A plan is unfurling in Michael’s mind. It feels contrary to everything else happening in there, like a relief. 

“Meet me behind the diner in an hour,” he says. He nudges Alex’s shoulder. “Bring a change of clothes. Something to listen to, not just a guy in eyeliner wailing.”

“Fuck you. I like wailing.” 

“Anybody gonna freak if you don’t come home tonight?” Nobody’s going to notice if Michael’s gone. That fact is horrible, and convenient. 

“No. I’ll tell Maria something, whatever,” Alex says, no hesitation. He looks up at Michael under his eyebrows. Michael’s stomach thrills. “You’re not gonna tell me what you’re planning?” 

Michael nudges his shoulder again, for the contact. “The moon,” he says. “Or something. It’s a surprise, Manes.” 

“I don’t love surprises,” Alex says, but he’s smiling. “I like to see things coming.” 

“Trust me.” 

“You’re crazy, Guerin.” Alex pushes himself off the truck. “Really. Fine, okay.” 

Michael watches him go, hands shoved in his pockets and shoulders up towards his ears. His distinctive stomp is back - heel first and eyebrows talking first, spit on me and I’ll spit on you. It makes Michael afraid for him too. One more point of worry. Ironic, considering the worst has already happened.

Not the worst, Michael corrects himself. Alex drives off, and he jumps to action, tidying things from his truck and changing his shirt, brushing his teeth. Ducking his head under the hose in the junkyard. 

They’re both still breathing, so not the worst. Not as bad as it could be.

Alex’s eyes scan the street for familiar faces before he gets in the truck. Michael loves driving, and he takes any excuse he’s got to get the Evans twins into the truck instead of riding in the back of their shared Toyota Corolla. But it's different when it's Alex. It’s distracting. Alex’s elbow propped up on the window - distracting; his knee bent to lean against the dashboard - distracting; his guitar in the back seat - distracting. Michael’s hand hurts around the steering wheel and he’s tired, so tired, but he doesn’t care. Alex looks at him. Trepidation and relief. 

Alex flicks on the radio. They don’t speak until they’re driving past the sign that says “Welcome to Roswell! I feel right at home!” with a stupid drawing of a little green man. 

“Just promise,” Alex says, and he turns his face in Michael’s direction, “that you’re not taking me somewhere to murder me horribly.” 

He says it lightly and Michael’s mind drops into chaos; Rosa, the burning car, Max’s anger, Isobel’s face - 

“Man, you can get murdered anywhere,” he says. He makes himself grin. It probably looks pretty frightening. After a second, it turns more natural. “How’s Santa Fe?” 

Alex grins back, sudden. “I envisioned it worse,” he says, which shouldn’t be funny but it is. None of this should be funny but Michael laughs anyway and Alex does too. 

Michael drops his foot on the gas pedal and blows through the speed limit. 

It’s just under two hundred miles between Roswell and Santa Fe, three hours if you’re following the law. Michael doesn’t. Alex gives him a look at one point that doesn’t exactly say he thinks that’s a bad idea, but does strongly suggest it. Michael picks up a little more speed. Alex turns the volume on the radio up louder. When Michael rolls all the windows down the air catches the words Alex is singing and pulls them across the highway, and all Michael can see is the expression on his face. Fear and elation. 

Michael wants to lean across the space and kiss him, hard enough that it becomes the only thing that matters. 

Santa Fe is beautiful, and bougie. They have to pay to park, which Alex does without asking. The two of them look conspicuous among vacationers and nicely dressed restaurant-goers in the main square, Michael in a too-big denim jacket that Max hadn’t wanted, and Alex all in black with a scowl on. 

“You ruined your plan,” Alex says, as they stroll kind of aimlessly up Canyon Road, through art alley, “to come here with Max. I mean, ruined the surprise. Ta da. Bunch of white people selling Navajo jewelry for three times what they do on the rez.” 

“If you want a big ugly ring I’ll take one and run,” Michael winks, and Alex rolls his eyes. He’s looking in gallery windows. Michael likes that he looks like he’s lurking. He doesn’t mind the dirty looks. Alex makes eye contact with a middle-aged woman behind a counter and glares back. “I don’t know if we’re gonna do that now anyway.” 

“Why not?” 

“I don’t know.” Michael can’t think of a reason that doesn’t sound fake. “Things are different. I don’t know.” 

Alex doesn’t ask for more than that. “Yeah,” he says. “They are.” 

Michael’s hand hurts.

“I want to go in that record store over there,” Alex says, and pushes past him, and Michael wonders vaguely if this was actually a bad idea. 

He buys a CD while Michael flips through the discount stack knowing he won’t purchase anything, and even though he stops a few more times to look through photography prints and novelty t-shirts with chili peppers, he makes his way back to the truck almost directly. Michael is content to follow, and he unlocks the car door so Alex can climb in. 

Alex fights with the plastic around the CD for a minute before Michael yanks it from him. He gives himself a little help with the stubborn sticky wrapper, the telepathic kind Alex won’t notice. And he doesn’t stop himself from touching Alex’s hand when he hands it back. Alex puts the CD on, and he doesn’t move his hand away. 

“I don’t really like this album,” Alex says. His thumb ghosts over the inside of Michael’s palm. 

“What is it?” 

“Third Eye Blind. Didn’t own it but, I don’t know. I feel like I want to. Rosa loved it.” 

He hadn’t expected Alex to mention that which is silly - Alex and Liz are friends, of course. But the details feels so personal and remembered. Alex’s fingers tighten around Michael’s hand when the first song starts. 

“Didn’t know you really knew her,” Michael says. 

“Like, forever,” Alex says. “She set the definition of cool, you know? She’d always give me ideas of music to listen to but wanted me to make up my own mind about it.” 

“You believe she,” this feels like testing churning water, “you know. Really ran those other girls off the road? Strung out, or whatever?” 

Alex’s fingers tighten more. “It’s fucked,” he says, not answering the question. “Everything. I had to basically fight my dad to go to her funeral and it then was fucking horrible. Maria keeps saying she wouldn’t want us to be sad but I don’t know if that’s true. And Liz - “ he stops. “Everything’s fucked.” 

It would be easy to just open his mouth and tell the truth. Michael can see how he’d start it - “Don’t worry it’s not true, I was there, and I didn’t know she was your friend.” If Michael had really done it, killed those girls, maybe he would. Just to share that secret with somebody else, anybody else - and Alex is singular the way so few other people are singular. It’s not just his secret, though. He thinks about Isobel’s face, and says nothing. 

Alex wipes at his face, with the hand not holding Michael’s hand.

“Can we keep driving or something? I don’t know if I want to be here anymore.” 

They go north of the city, into the Carson National Forest. Higher elevation and a few early season campers eat their dust. The landscape gets stranger as the afternoon goes on, and shadows drape themselves around the car and the wide stretches of hillside they can see from the window. 

“Somewhere up here there’s a national lab,” Alex says, “where they created the atomic bomb.” 

“Like, up in the woods?” 

“Yeah. Los Alamos. Secret national security shit. I got to go inside once when I was a kid, with - you know. My family.” Alex touches the back of his neck, the fading bruise. 

“Wholesome family pastime,” Michael shakes his head, “weapons of mass destruction.” He wants to ask if that’s the first time that’s happened, with Alex’s father. If that kind of thing happens a lot. Fingers around Alex’s neck; the answer is obvious. Instead, he pulls the truck onto a dirt side road, bounces them along through scrub brush and wildflowers and then stops. “Gotta take a leak,” he says as an explanation. Pretense is pretense. 

When he comes back, Alex is sitting in the tailgate looking at the view. It’s sweeping, golden grass and red rocks and a late afternoon New Mexico sky that’s too blue to be believed. Lately, Michael has been wondering at geography as a point of comparison. If other places, other planets, look like this. He closes his eyes and breathes out, wind and sunshine and the warm proximity of Alex’s body. He could doze off like that, miles from anywhere with nobody else around and nothing that needs saying. They could keep driving forever. 

Alex touches his shoulder, and when Michael opens his eyes he finds he’s being looked at. 

“Thanks,” Alex says, “for taking me here.” 

He closes his eyes as Michael kisses him. Michael does as slowly as he can, until he can’t take it. Alex opens his mouth. Michael grasps at his shoulder, and his hand screams in pain but he ignores it. He ignores it because he doesn’t matter as the realization dawns with certainty in his mind. Alex pulls his shirt over his head, a blanket over their shoulders. His fingers are purposeful and his face is so serious. 

And Michael’s in love with him. The fact drops into his mind like a stone down a well. Once thrown, it’s impossible to get back. 

Alex says Michael’s name into his shoulder and Michael repeats the fact; he pushes Alex onto his back and he repeats the fact; he feels Alex’s fingers in his hair and he repeats it, repeats it, repeats it again. 

\---

He wakes up to the sound of Alex playing the guitar. 

It’s still dark, somewhere on the underside of morning. Alex is sitting cross-legged, the edge of a blanket over his shoulder, playing his guitar in the dark. 

Gentle and melodious, nothing Michael recognizes. The sound is almost lost in the hills and the expanse of the sky. Alex plays carefully and with intention, like he does everything. No room for missteps. He slows down rather than hit a wrong note and it ruins the flow, but then he matches tempo again. 

This is the first time Michael’s ever fallen in love with somebody. He doesn’t know if it’s always like this, the way the his desire to know insignificant details is overwhelming. He wants all of them all at once, even the bad ones. He’s greedy with it. He can feel, tangibly, the end of this coming their way. Time running out is a physical sensation and every moment that slides by is one he isn’t going to get back. He focuses on moments, and details. 

Alex’s ear, the glint of silver in it. The curve of his shoulder under the blanket, the dark hair at the nape of his neck. His eyelashes. The way Michael can still taste him in his mouth. How his forehead creases as he concentrates. Blunt nails on the fretboard. The buzz of the strings, something both out in the air and deep inside the bone and muscle of his chest. The tendons of Alex’s hand flex, then release - a pattern. 

Michael’s hand aches. He can’t escape the bigger picture. It’s too late for that. 

He touches Alex’s shoulder with two fingers of his left hand, all he can reach. Alex stops playing and looks down at him. Michael tries to focus on detail - his eyelashes, his chin, the arch of an eyebrow - and can’t and he feels himself falling. 

“I woke you up,” Alex says. His voice is hazy and thick. Like he’s been crying, or he’s about to. “Shit. Go back to sleep, Guerin.” 

Alex is going to tell him that he’s leaving. It’s like a premonition. Once you start breaking down the laws of matter and constraint, anything is possible. 

“Don’t mind,” Michael murmurs. “Just keep playing, okay?” 

Alex looks at him, and then out at the stretch of dawn. And then he does. 


	3. Boise - 2011

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Boise - 2011

They keep in touch, a little, in the next few years.

It feels like subterfuge caught in lines of meaningless bullshit. Michael checks his email at the free computers in the public library, early mornings or late at night because he works long days. Max can’t complain about him loitering around the public library. Max enrolls in the police academy and he gets good at complaining - better at it, even, than worrying. 

Michael worries too, and Max knows it and Michael can’t hate that. He works long hours, and he lurks around the public library, and he gets a fake ID so he can buy his own beer, and he watches Isobel and waits. 

Alex complains over email, but Michael doesn’t mind reading that as much. It gives him a tiny sliver image of where he is now. Bad food, good views, in the two years he’s in Colorado Springs. A lot of early mornings and late nights, when he’s stationed in Alabama. 

Michael does the same thing, probably in the same way. No lies exactly, but half-truths. 

He doesn’t write I miss you. He doesn’t write I think about kissing you on the road to Santa Fe, in the back of my truck, in the dust fifteen miles outside town with nobody around. He doesn’t write Every time I close my eyes there you are. 

But Alex doesn’t write any of those things either. 

Michael imagines coded messages, intercepted mail. He reads between the lines and tries to think like Alex thinks to understand what he might be feeling as he writes. Sometimes it takes him a long time to respond to things, but he always does. And nothing much changes in Roswell. 

He watches. He works hard when it suits him, and weathers Max, and coaxes Isobel into mischief to see her smile in the way that she does when he’s being troublesome. He buys a trailer, metal walls better than a fixed address. He thinks about his own history, gravitational pulls, the people he sleeps with, how secrets get buried - and Alex Manes. 

Max doesn’t want him to think about the past. Sometimes, Michael feels like that’s the only thing he’s good at. 

And a couple years in, Alex extends an invitation. 

Boise, Idaho is in the middle of absolutely nowhere. Brown plains rise into brown hills and there’s one reprieve, a greenbelt following a river in the middle of the city. The drive doesn’t take Michael as long as he expected so he’s there hours before Alex’s flight is due. He sits by the water and drinks beer out of a soda bottle, hoping nobody will look his way. Nobody does. 

Alex should be a stranger in the airport. It’s been a year and a half since they last saw each other for more than a few hours, broken by a frantic afternoon over Christmas when Alex had come home the year before. But he recognizes him from across the lobby anyway, like something in his internal compass is attuned to him. Spinning out uselessly when confused by the distance, it alights immediately with trepidation and relief. 

Alex looks different. And the same. His hair is short, his face utterly clean-shaven and his jaw set in a rictus of professionalism as he makes his way across the room. He’s dressed in plainsclothes, neutral and unassuming. Nothing black. Max has been talking a lot about assimilation, the safety in blending into the background so nobody looks at you twice. It feels like cutting away part of who Michael is, when Max talks about it. A past he barely even understands left to the wayside, for human constructs like happy hour and speed limits and long weekends. 

Alex looks like that. 

But something in his eyes melts like ice in the sun as he gets closer, and Michael sees him.

They stare at each other. Alex breathes out, Michael breathes in. 

“You were right,” Michael says, finally. “Boise is just as exciting as you promised it would be.”

“When I promised you that,” Alex says, “I’d never been to Boise.” 

His face cracks into a smile. 

“Come on,” Alex says. “I could murder a burrito. And I hate airports.” 

“Don’t you fly planes or some shit?” 

“Not those kinds of planes, Guerin.” Alex waits for Michael to turn and walk to his truck, two steps behind him. He tosses his bag - a big green Air Force duffel - into the back, then climbs into the passenger seat. 

Alex is on leave. Two months ago he’d send Michael an email, subject line “Discover Who You Truly Are in the Potato City…” and two days ago Michael had gotten into his truck and driven through Colorado and Utah. He told Max he was considering becoming a farmer. He told Isobel he was going to see an old friend. 

This isn’t the first time they’ve done this, exactly. Early on, Michael had driven to Denver to meet Alex, then only close to nineteen and newly out of buzz-cut basic training, in a truly shitty hotel. They’d walked on a few hiking trails and admired some concert venue and Alex had bought Michael a cowboy hat. Black. 

“If you’re gonna be a ranch hand,” he’d said, “you ought to look the part at least.” 

Michael left the hat on, when they’d had sex. Until Alex had stolen it. 

Alex hadn’t asked why Michael was still in Roswell. Michael hadn’t asked for Alex to tell him the truth about how things were going in basic training. And when Michael had left at the end of the weekend, Alex’s eyes had slid from his.

“See you when I see you,” he had said. 

And now they’re here. 

Downtown Boise, Idaho is surprisingly trendy and livestock-free, restaurants and breweries and an REI all laid out in a neat grid. It’s a little disappointing. He’d almost wanted it to be a dump. Michael maneuvers the truck into a parking space, hard to do when he can’t turn one eye away from Alex’s face. Alex looks at him, then looks away, then looks back like he always does. When Alex moves to get out of the car, Michael almost wants to open it for him just to see what he’ll do. He’s not the kind of person who does stuff like that, but he could be if nobody else knew him. 

Three years ago it had been a joke but now it feels kind of like neutral ground.

“My friend Tony Hawk here wants a margarita,” Michael says to the waitress in the Mexican restaurant they end up in. “What Mister Hawk wants, Mister Hawk gets.”

“Whatever,” the waitress says, and takes their menus away. 

“You could’ve at least told her my name is Billie Joe Armstrong,” Alex says, and that feels like relief too. Three years and Michael’s stomach still turns over. 

“You don’t look like a jarhead,” Michael comments, halfway through their meal.

“Thank you? Not a Marine, so I’d hope not.” 

“How is it then?” 

Alex shrugs. “It’s not so bad,” he says. 

“The Gestapo’s not so bad?” Michael snorts. “What, they only let you out of the building once you can recite that without bursting into tears? You’re not immune to their propaganda, Manes. Run for your life!” 

“They’ve done away with that now that they just put the chip right into your brain,” Alex says, and steals one of Michael’s tortillas. “These are not as good as Arturo’s. That’s what I miss most about Roswell. Mexican food in Alabama sucks.” 

“I’ll be sure to pass that compliment on to the whole town,” Michael says. “It’s waiting on bated breath for the judgement of Airman Manes.” Alex rolls his eyes, tears the tortilla up with his fingers and eats it. “You weren’t exactly Captain Patriot in high school. Thought you said it was stupid.” 

“It is. Futile and stupid and boring. But I mean, so was high school. So’s a lot of things. Being a ranch hand isn’t stupid and futile?” 

This conversation doesn’t seem to want to stay where Michael directs it. Conversations with Alex never do. Michael had pictured fevered tension, awkward silences, sex. Not - whatever this is. 

“It gives me a feeling of satisfaction, completeness, and the proud glow of a job well done,” Michael snaps. “And that’s not even sexually!” 

“You look good in the cowboy hat, I get it.” 

Michael wants to linger on that comment, not the rest of this. “I’m out of that work ‘til the spring anyway,” he says. “Don’t worry though. I brought the hat with me.” 

“Why are you still in Roswell?” Alex says, no pretense. 

“Why do you care?” 

“I’ve been wondering,” Alex says. “Didn’t want to go to UNM? You could go anywhere else in the world. Roswell’s not that great.”

“Talk about stupid and futile. I’d miss the Mexican food.” 

“Okay,” Alex says, frowning. He’s paid for their bill before Michael could think to stop him. 

“You wanna keep talking about work? Or do you want to get out of here?” Michael stands up, hoping that will be the end of it. Alex stands too, still frowning. 

In the street outside the restaurant, Alex catches his arm. “Wait,” he says, “Guerin, wait - “ and when Michael turns Alex catches his face with his hands and then suddenly he’s being kissed. There on the sidewalk next to his truck, he’s being kissed and Alex’s strong hands hold him still until he kisses back. It doesn’t take much. Distance evaporates like nothing and Michael clutches at him, all at once overwhelmed and giddy. 

It’s been three years. It’s natural to ask the question, wonder at how something might fade with time and distance. But Alex kisses him there in the street and Michael’s still in love with him, unshakeable and true. 

“Didn’t expect that,” he says faintly. Alex moves back a little like he’s embarrassed but Michael doesn’t let him go. “Don’t think somebody’s gonna see you?” 

“Who would?” Alex says, looking at Michael through his lashes. “This is Boise. You see anyone you know?” 

So Michael kisses him again. This time with intention, to send a message. 

“Get in the truck,” Alex says, hoarse, and they make it to the parking lot of the motel before Alex gets Michael’s zipper down. 

They make it into the lobby of the motel before Michael considers that might have been a mistake. He’s hard and clearly disheveled, and Alex inquires after their room in a flat, professional voice so he runs his thumbnail up the stitching of his jeans in the back. Alex swallows. 

“Thank you very much ma’am,” he blurts to the bored clerk at the desk who hands them their key. They stumble into the hallway, into the door. It takes Alex three tries to get the keycard into the slot because Michael’s working his fingers along the waistband of his jeans. They get inside. Alex shoves Michael up against the door, grabs at his belt buckle with both hands. 

“This thing is stupid,” he says, fighting with the giant silver clasp. 

“You like it.” 

“It’s shoving into my dick. Take it off.” 

Michael strips out of his jeans and his shoes in one go. Alex pins him by the waist, new strength in his arms that hadn’t been there at eighteen. 

They make it onto the bed. Eventually. And when Alex dozes, time difference finally catching him, Michael stays awake. 

The motel room is horrible, the AC humming in the background like a drone. He smooths the cheap, shiny motel comforter over Alex’s shoulders and lies back. Closes his eyes. 

Michael reaches out to him in that other sense, the uninhibited alien one. The space in between what’s real and impossible, where connections aren’t absolute and even reality is tenuous. He feels the charged, moving molecules of Alex’s body and the space between them, energy and possibility. Resting energy that could become kinetic and real and - Alex moves, stretches, turns his face towards Michael’s in his sleep - it does with nothing more than the whisper of a thought and electricity. 

Human bodies are so weak and so impossibly strung together. Alex’s existence is an improbability, statistically, and the forces that hold him together are so tenuous. Michael feels them like a second language, half-remembered and comforting. He maps them in his mind. Memorizes them. For later, when this is over - because it will be. It always is. 

Love is a neurological response to chemical charges in the brain. Michael had read this once. He has no reason to believe those chemicals are the same, inside his own head, because he has no reason to know. He has only what he feels - like gravity, intuition and time. 

Michael lies awake for a long time, watching Alex breathe. He doesn’t tire of it, and everything inside his head is calm. 

He wakes up to the sound of Alex in the shower. The morning light in Boise, Idaho is flat and brown like everything else is flat and brown. Michael lies there for a while listening to the water running, and tries not to feel nervous. 

Alex comes out of the bathroom, his hair damp. He’s put on an old Green Day t-shirt that’s too tight across his arms and chest, once black but faded to grey, and sweats. Michael’s shrugged his jeans back on. He’s hoping he’ll have a reason to take them off again. 

“Want a beer?” He asks. “I know it’s early but it is a Saturday and no offense to Boise but I think I’ve seen all I need to see of that particular sight.”

Alex nods. He looks nervous. His hands drum on his knees in a staccato, one two three four five and then the rhythm breaks. Michael is suddenly, horrible nervous as he pops bottle caps, passes one over. 

“I have to tell you something,” Alex says. He takes the glass bottle automatically but doesn’t drink out of it.

“Don’t tell me you’re married,” Michael says, reaching for ridiculous and falling short. He gulps beer. “I mean, you hear that one once - “ 

“I’m being deployed.” 

Michael drops the beer bottle. Rather than breaking, it withstands the impact and bounces. Beer foams out through the mouth, across the already-sticky hotel floor. Michael scrambles for it, almost yanks it into the air without touching it without thinking. Alex, staring at the wall in front of him, probably wouldn’t even register it. 

“You’re what the fuck now?” 

“You heard me.” 

Michael slams the bottle down on the dresser next to the inexpensive hotel TV. Alex flinches, just slightly. He almost stops himself doing it but Michael sees it anyway. 

“Where? When? Why?” He spits out idiotic questions like they’ll fix it somehow, like more data will walk back what Alex just said. Michael can see the truth of it though, on his face. Alex is a pretty bad liar. He’d probably have had an easier time of it if he was any good at it. 

“Oh, Finland,” Alex says, almost a sneer. “Where do you think? A base just outside Baghdad, for now. After that, who knows.”

“How long?” Michael can’t stop asking the idiotic questions, like a histrionic housewife. 

“Five months, plus or minus ten days. For now.”

Alex has all the answers to his idiotic questions. Expected them. He repeats them like he’s reading from a book. Michael collapses onto the bed and the springs squeak. It should have been funny. It makes him want to scream. 

“For now.” 

“This was always a possibility,” Alex says. Rote and comforting. Why is he comforting Michael when he’s the one being bundled into the United States war machine and shoves across the planet? “I’ve been working on a team that’s developing counterintelligence software and - and you don’t want to hear about that, it’s the work. I’m not thrilled, but it’s happening.” 

“So - what?” Michael is suddenly so angry he can’t breathe. At the universe and all of it, even human construct obligation and argument and border line. “This is - what?” A goodbye? An ending? A promise? He doesn’t know. “I remember when you didn’t want to fall in line with the family legacy, Manes. I remember when you hated that.” 

“I just - “ Alex trails off into silence. For the first time he’s almost unrecognizable, Michael thinks. His eerie calm and his acceptance. So Michael keeps going. 

“You asked me to come meet you in fucking Idaho to tell me this?” 

Alex looks at his hands. He has unfamiliar calluses on his thumbs and his palm. “I guess so,” he says. “I didn’t want to tell you over the phone. I owe you that much.” 

“Always looking out for my best interests, huh.” Alex thinks he owes him and this meeting is to settle that debt. The universe owes Michael a favor or two - or ten - or a thousand. But not Alex. Until now. This might be something Michael holds against him for real. 

“I wasn’t sure if it would make it better or harder.” 

“Don’t know about you but I’m having a super great time, imagining you carpet bombing civilians and getting shot at.” Alex’s jaw tightens, which is the intended effect. Michael wants to shove at that reaction until it explodes into something horrible. His own anger sits right at the base of his skull. He wants to throw furniture around the room. Scream. Tear the wallpaper. “I mean, shit. There have got to be more creative ways to get your daddy to pay attention to you. Is that it? Or you’re just afraid to say no?” 

“That’s not exactly how it works,” Alex says. The muscle in his jaw flexes again. 

“Oh,” Michael figures it out. “You don’t want to. That’s it. Right.” 

“It’s not a choice,” Alex rounds on him, suddenly full of kinetic energy and bristling anger. “Never a choice. But - shit. I still want to see other places, you know? Something bigger than the shit I’m saddled with. Right now I’m trapped in fucking Alabama. World’s a big place, and maybe this is a chance to see something new. It’s not exactly how I wanted it but - it was never gonna be.” 

His mouth closes on his words with some finality. There’s color high in his cheeks and Michael fixates on that. 

“Great,” Michael snaps. “It’s a cool vacation with ballistics training! You want me to applaud?” He does, sarcastically. 

Alex looks away. He exhales, and Michael watches the fight go out of him. He feels his own anger ebbing. He wants to hold onto it, struck by the terrifying feeling that when it goes the only thing connecting them will be gone too. 

“This was a bad idea,” Alex says. 

“You’re being deployed.” Michael says it slow, trying to make his mind understand the sentence. Alex, leaving the country. Military greens and faraway sand and peril. 

“I shouldn’t have put you through this, I shouldn’t have - I’m sorry.” 

Michael can’t understand why he’s apologizing. “What? You’d rather write me a Dear John letter?” 

“Fuck you,” Alex says, but he just sounds tired. Uncertain. That sound brings something perilously close to terror to the surface of Michael’s brain. He bites down on it, suddenly afraid of shattering lightbulbs and the hotel bedspread taking flight by itself. 

“One more time for the road, huh?” Michael’s mouth works by itself. 

Alex looks at him. “That’s not what this is either,” he says, and there’s a spark of defiance. Michael wants to eat it. 

It’s funny that Alex seems to know so clearly what it’s not, but he has no idea what exactly it is. Things can’t just not be something - they have to be something else too, either occupy space or negate it. Rules of the universe. 

“Well, we’ll always have,” Michael looks around the hotel room, out the window at the lack of a view - flat brown land rising into steep brown hills, “Boise?” 

They stare at each other in the late morning light. Michael tells himself to fix Alex’s face in his mind - his terrible haircut, dark shadows under his darker eyes, the set of his shoulders. Take a picture, it’ll last longer. But remembering has never been his problem. 

Then Alex is moving and Michael is too, a moment of synchronicity that seems so impossible considering where they’ve been, where they’re going. Alex kisses him, slow and uncertain. Michael kisses him back, insistent and sure. He can do that for a moment, long enough to last. He takes Alex apart slowly even when Alex curses at him. And he thinks, mouth under Alex’s jaw and Alex’s eyes watching him and then looking away and returning again in a loop as he gasps, that he’s not a praying sort of man but he might become one. He’d get on his knees and beg to high heaven - to whatever god might be real or listening, to any force in the universe that might take pity on lovers and losers like Michael Guerin and throw him a cosmic bone, just once - for this day to never, ever end. He could stay like that, on his knees on a shitty hotel room bedspread with Alex moments from coming under his hands, until the heat death of the universe. 

But the world hates lovers and losers, like Michael Guerin. The day passes, the next morning’s sun comes up, and Alex leaves. 

Alex doesn’t promise to call or write. Michael doesn’t ask when he’ll hear from him.

Then, they don’t see each other for a long time. 

And Michael starts building a spaceship. 


	4. Kaiserslautern, Germany - 2017

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaiserslautern, Germany - 2017 

Michael is in the drunk tank - again - when the news reaches him. 

It’s more a game of toeing the line than it is a cry for help, really. Half of the pleasures in Michael’s life these days - and he takes them where he can get them - come from watching Max blow something completely out of proportion, blow up about it, and then literally blow something up. This morning he’s hoping for the power grid. 

“Proud of yourself?” Max glares at him from the other side of the sheriff’s back room. Hands on his hips and in uniform, he looks like a big kid playing dress-up.

“Oh, totally,” Michael grins lazily. He’s got a pounding headache and his mouth tastes like an old shoe, but it is worth it. 

“You can’t behave like an actual maniac in private, at home?” 

“Then I’d miss the pleasure of your company, Maxwell!” Michael’s pretty good at spinning through the list of buttons that are sure to push Max over the edge. Max’s jaw twitches. It’s only eight in the morning. 

“I think I can do without it this morning,” Max mutters. He opens his mouth to say something more but he’s interrupted when Sheriff Valenti pushes her way through the door with purpose.

Dearly departed Jim Valenti had been alright as the watchful eye looking in on Michael’s one-man mission to make his brother miserable. A bit of a drinker, he was always good for a joke when nobody else was looking. Michelle Valenti is a real hardass though. Michael might admire that if she wasn’t directly in his way a lot of the time. She’d handily gotten herself into the job with an intent of purpose Michael usually pictures in the deranged, and had apparently just worked her way through her grief with a steel backbone and an increased arrest rate around town. 

Michael’s smart enough to only get hauled in when he wants to. Mostly.

But today though, she looks watery and strange. He certainly doesn’t know her well, but Michael can tell there’s an express of shock or sadness on her face that doesn’t sit there comfortably. 

“I found our overnight visitor,” Max is saying, apparently at a loss. 

“Just let him out,” Valenti says. Michael takes back every nasty thought he’s ever had about her. She’s an angel.

“What? At least four people registered noise complaints because of him last night!”

“Just,” Valenti waves a hand, “let him out. You know where he lives.” She pushes her knuckles across the ridge of her nose and into the corner of her eye, an exhausted gesture. 

“Sheriff,” Max says, tentatively. “Is there something wrong?” 

“I got some bad news this morning,” she says heavily. 

“Anything I can help with?” Kissass. 

“No, Deputy. Nothing like that. A family matter. It’s - well,” she pauses, frowns. “I suppose you’ll find out sooner or later. It’ll be all around town soon enough. And I suppose you knew him.” 

Max crosses the room to her, despite her instruction to let Michael go. Whatever this is, Michael wants no part of it. “Hey!” he yells, but they both ignore him. 

“What is it?” Max asks. 

“You remember Alex Manes, don’t you? Jesse Manes’s youngest.” 

Michael stops moving. Stops breathing. Stops doing much of anything other than listening, desperately. He’s not meant to overhear this conversation and he doesn’t want to but he can’t escape it. 

“Sure,” Max nods. “Not well, but we were in the same graduating class and the eyeliner was hard to miss. Good friends with Liz Ortecho, right?” 

“Yes,” Valenti says. “Good friend with my son, for a while.” 

That makes Michael wants to bend the bars and run, but he doesn’t. Doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe so he doesn’t miss what’s next. 

“Air Force?” 

Sheriff Valenti looks at Max and she seems to be almost on the verge of tears. 

“Yes,” she says. “A nice young man. We kept in touch a little. Mostly after Jim died. He - oh.” She stops, swallows. “I almost said he was in a terrible accident, but I don’t think you could call it that. I got a call from a military hospital - “

Michael’s world closes in on him like an avalanche. 

Alex - hearing the name’s almost enough to stop his heart on its own - and terrible accident. A thousand images rise in his mind, crashed planes and rapid gunfire and the kind of folded flag funeral you see on television. 

“Oh my God,” Max says, like Michael’s universe isn’t hurtling into blackness and panic. “Overseas you mean? Is he - “ 

“He’s alive,” Valenti says faintly. “It’s too early to say and they couldn’t tell me anything conclusive but he hadn’t woken up.” 

“Jesus,” Max says heavily. “Sheriff, just go home. I’ll deal with him and hold things down here. I’m sorry to hear that. Do you want me to, I don’t know, send condolences to the family from the department? Or something?” 

Valenti laughs nastily. “Do not do that,” she says. “It’s very sweet of you to think it but Master Sergeant Manes can go fuck himself.” 

“Maybe you should go home,” Max says again and their voices slide into unimportance. Michael leans his face against the cold metal bar and tries not to vomit, tries not to scream. 

At some point, the sheriff leaves and Michael is vaguely aware that Max crosses the room again to look at him. 

“Boss says I have to let you out of here,” he says. 

Michael says nothing. He doesn’t think he can. 

“We’re going to talk about this later,” Max says. 

Max is stuck on Michael yanking his proverbial pigtails and Michael can’t think of anything he cares about less in that moment than that. Max sighs, and he opens the door. Michael practically falls out of it, his body moving out of adrenaline and instinct. The ground feels unsteady and foreign. Max’s face swims.

“Are you okay?” Max asks. Michael stumbles past him towards the exit, snatching his jacket from the back of Max’s chair. “Michael! What the hell is going on?”

“Leave me alone,” Michael manages. “Just leave me the fuck alone.” 

Max watches him crash his way through the office and into the parking lot, and he doesn’t follow. 

Michael gets into his truck, and he drives to the bar. And then he gets drunk for a week. 

The fundamental physical constants of the universe are hard, identifiable forces that constrain Michael’s life. He’s interested in finding ways around them, how they might be bent or broken or used to his advantage. Time can be a slingshot for a spaceship, and gravity the weight on the end of a lever. He took them for granted before he began to think about them as obstructions to his purpose, and he doesn’t anymore. Another planet might operate by entirely different rules, shuck metrics and rewrite them. 

The speed of light in a vacuum, the gravitational constant, the fine-structure constant, the elementary charge. Time, gravity, and Alex Manes. 

The possibility had always been there, and Michael has never thought about Alex - world’s away - to be out of danger. That hadn’t been true right here in Roswell, another indisputable fact. But without evidence, Michael had always been able to pretend something to the contrary. 

Evidence sounds like “he hasn’t woken up.” And nothing in the world makes sense. 

\---

Roswell is technically a city, but gossip races through it like it does through small towns - especially concerning a family whose names are recognizable. The story usually plays out like this:

You know Jesse Manes, and all those boys? The youngest, Air Force just like his father, lost his leg in Iraq somewhere. Yes, horrible. He was unconscious for 36 hours. What a brave man, what a sacrifice. His father’s probably so proud. Well, he should be. You never can tell with Jesse Manes. You know what they say about him, right? Well, it’s just talk. 

Alex, that’s the name. Sure, we remember. Troubled as a kid but I suppose he grew out of it. Well you would be, with a father like that. 

What a brave young man.

What a sacrifice. 

None of them have any clue. Michael does. Michael knows what it was like to watch Alex kick-flip a skateboard, light on his feet and delighted with himself. Michael also knows exactly what kind of father Jesse Manes is. 

He takes an adverse pleasure in the fact that the idiots who live in this idiotic city would run for the hills if Michael’s secrets ever came to light. Sometimes he imagines that, to make himself feel better. 

He walks into the Wild Pony and pictures them all stampeding towards the exit, but then stops short. The bar, usually occupied one a few different familiar faces, is empty. Maybe they already have.

Michael crosses the room to peer around the bar, leaning halfway over it to be particularly irritating. Maria DeLuca’s ability to sense trouble is uncanny. But she doesn’t appear. There’s the door to a back room behind the bar and Michael thinks, faintly, that he can hear a voice back there. 

The only other people seated at the counter are two airmen in uniform and their conversation sounds familiar - “Did you hear about the Master Sergeant’s son?” - and God, Michael needs a drink. 

“DeLuca!” Michael hollers, but she doesn’t come back around from the back room even when he yells her name a second time. “What kinda service is this?” 

Michael considers just hopping over the bar and ransacking its contents. But Maria could come back any second, and she’ll kick him out for good and maybe turn a shotgun on him if she catches him. He has the sudden hysterical image of her running him out into the street with a torch. It’s followed by the thought that he could probably just stand back there and mix a few drinks himself, and let her pay him in booze. 

All unwise, if he ever wants to come back to this bar again. Michael likes this bar. You get used to things when proximity shoves you together. So he steps behind the counter and pushes aside the bead curtain to the back room - and immediately regrets doing it. 

Because Maria is sitting on a keg with her back to the door, head in her hands. Michael is suddenly and awkwardly aware that she’s crying. Nothing ladylike or attractive about it either, big ugly uncomfortable sobs that make her shoulders shake. And that he’s standing there watching her do it like a creep. 

“Uh,” he says, to break some of the silence, “sorry, just looking for a bartender, usually found at the bar?”

“Guerin?” Maria whirls around. “What are you doing?” 

“Looking for a drink. And, you know, figured you might not wanna leave your bar unattended with the kind of clientele you get.” 

“You talking about yourself?” She glares over her shoulder. “I’ll be a minute, I’ll be - “ Her voice hiccups unpleasantly. “Fuck.” 

There’s a tiny, awful part of Michael Guerin that can’t just walk away from the woman who pours his drinks when she’s sobbing in the dark. A conscience, or something. He sighs. 

“You okay?” 

“Go away,” Maria repeats. “I was having an awful day before I even started talking to you.” 

“Then I can’t really make it worse,” Michael says, and he steps around the keg and sits down. Maria’s face is blotchy and there’s mascara smeared under her eyes and up towards one eyebrow. She glares at him, or tries to. She’s clutching her cell phone in between her hands. 

“I don’t know if I can handle you growing good manners right now,” she manages. 

“I mean, you keep telling me to leave and I’m not listening to you. So don’t worry about that.” 

Maria purses her lips. “Awful day,” she repeats. “Or maybe it was the best I’ve had in two weeks. I’m not sure. I thought I had everything on lock, with what’s been going on, but one phone call and I’m blubbering in a hallway.” 

“Quite a phone call,” Michael says. “Tax collector?” 

Maria rolls her eyes. Her wet eyelashes stick to her eyelids for a second. “I suppose you wouldn’t understand,” she says. “It’s the kind of emotion that requires having a heart.”

“Try me,” Michael says, and softens it with a lurid wink. “Might surprise you.” 

“Euch,” Maria pulls a face. She studies him for a second anyway. “It’s about my best friend,” she says finally. 

“Racist Hank?”

“Literally Guerin, jump in a creek. No.” She takes a deep breath, steadying her voice. “Alex Manes. You remember him, right?” 

Maria’s voice is soft and sad and fond and Michael kind of knew where this was heading. 

“Sure,” he says, aiming for neutral. He’s not that convincing but he doesn’t think Maria notices. “I mean, the fuck-you attitude really sticks in the mind. Also, he’s the talk of the town right now.”

“They’re all dicks,” Maria says. “And they have no idea what they’re talking about. He’s just something for them to talk about, but he’s my best friend.” 

Michael’s surprised at the rush of understanding. Maria also knows what Alex, seventeen, looked like on a skateboard. Alex had talked about her a lot, always with an almost unbearable gentleness, and even though Michael grown up into a thorn in her side he still carries a little bit of that feeling when he looks at her. 

“Do you know how he’s doing?” Michael asks, softly. It seems like the right thing to ask but Maria almost immediately wells up again. 

“I talked to him,” she manages. Despite her tears she sounds delighted and she’s smiling and Michael can’t blame her because he’s breathing easy again suddenly, swiftly, surely. It means alive, awake, it means better than the alternative, it means Michael’s universe righting itself on its orbit again. 

Maria is talking unprompted, unaware of any of this. 

“For a week I’ve just been talking to doctors who don’t want to tell me anything because I’m not related and I couldn’t stop thinking about the only people he’s speaking to being doctors and the shitheads he is related to. Family doesn’t always mean blood, you know? We’re family. But I guess someone passed it on because he called.” 

“From Iraq?” 

“He’s at a hospital in Germany. Something with an L? I don’t remember.” Maria wipes her face, smearing her makeup around more. “He was pretty out of it. Baked like a cake. He would say that, you know, when he’d smoke with Rosa and me. ‘You baked, Manes?’ ‘Like a cake.’ Idiot. But this is probably morphine or something. It doesn’t matter. I talked to him anyway.”

Alive, Michael thinks, and awake, and baked like a cake. 

“I’m so relieved,” Maria says, “and scared and horrified and angry. I had this feeling that something bad was going to happen. I just didn’t expect it to be Alex.” 

“He lent me his guitar,” Michael says. He doesn’t really mean to. “In high school. A couple times.” 

Maria’s face creases.“He did stuff like that.” She studies Michael for a moment. “I didn’t realize you really knew each other,” she says. 

For a single, long moment Michael wants to blurt out the whole sorry story, beginning to end. It would put them on the same page or something like it, he and Maria DeLuca, a solidarity in caring about somebody in a way that nobody else understands or takes seriously. She’d listen. She’d probably take it well. She might even like him more, by proximity. 

But secrets are habits just as much as whiskey and all-nighters are. Michael swallows. 

“Just a little,” he says. “And not very well.” 

“Right,” Maria says. 

“Enough that I’m really sorry about what happened,” Michael says, for posterity. He wants to say something meaningful and real but words are always easy when they get him in trouble, and so hard when he’s concerned about how they land. He wants to press her for details - how and where and when and why. He wants to buy a plane ticket. Ask for Alex’s number. Scream. 

He doesn’t do any of those things. He just looks at Maria DeLuca’s smeared mascara, and feels like a coward. 

“When he was a kid,” Maria says slowly, “he was always stomping around everywhere like he was on a mission. And now they’ve amputated his leg below the knee.” 

Michael is sick to his stomach, all over again. 

Maria wipes her eyes one more time. “Okay,” she says decisively, and stands up. “Come on, Guerin. I’m gonna clean my face up and then I guess you’ve earned a few rounds on the house for this.” 

“That’s the only reason I’m here, you know,” Michael says. 

“Yeah, I know,” Maria puts her hand on his shoulder, just for a moment. Her bracelet jangles gently in his ear. And then she cuffs him gently upside the head and cuts past him to walk the rest of the way down the hall and through another door, probably a back bathroom. Michael watches her go and then stands in the dark for a moment, alone. Tries to wrap his mind around new facts.

Somewhere in Germany. That brings up mental associations of forests and authoritarianism and mustached men screaming. It’s no more or less distant than Iraq, which Michael always pictured as a somewhat nebulous point on a map more than biased news coverage. Neither are places he knows, places he’s been. But he fixes that idea in his mind to remove mutability with facts.

Alex is - alive, and in Germany somewhere, and placing phone calls, and irrevocably changed in a way Michael feels sick to think about. 

It’s been years, long ones and short ones and ones that were both, since last Michael saw him. And he’s irrevocably changed. Michael, too, hasn’t stayed the same. Time is supposed to give people the luxury of growing into new shapes, not be forced into them. 

Something they still have in common, then, even through all this distance. 

Michael closes his eyes. He thinks about the sheer number of nautical miles between there and here, one body and another one. On a globe it wouldn’t look so great, if you were far enough away. A day trip. He reaches outward, moving through molecules and electric currents as far as he can go. Geography loses meaning but entropy still applies. 

If there’s a connection - something in the space between where he is and where Alex is - then Michael doesn’t feel it. 


	5. 33.160992, -104.743311 - 2018

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 33.160992, -104.743311 - 2018 

“I’m asking you because Liz suggested it,” Alex says blandly. 

Michael is propped up on the corner of a shitty tourist’s bar and Alex is making eye contact with the space above his shoulder rather than look him in the eye. It’s what he deserves, probably. When Alex had materialized in Michael’s blurry vision he’d thought it a nice little joke. Kick a man while he’s down - and Michael is down, and down, and down. 

But Alex is asking him for a favor. Michael yanks his mind back to the conversation.

“Not much suggested as I told her I would,” Alex is saying, “because frankly what she needs to do tomorrow is sleep. So I’m asking you. You can say no.” 

Michael doesn’t need Alex’s permission to say no, and both of them know it. “You want me to,” he pauses, frowning, “take you to see Max? He’s a stiff. It’s not that interesting.” 

“I need information.” Alex’s hands are clasped behind his back. He looks austere and serious in the neon-green decor of the bar. “I need to see some things for myself. But I also think it’s best you don’t just give me the coordinates of his location, just in case I get asked that question.” 

That should be an overreaction, and Michael’s soaked brain can’t exactly piece together why Alex sounds like he’s thinking about firing squads. 

“Fine,” Michael gives in, and Alex’s eyebrows relax. “Not too early. I’m really just getting started here.” He leers. That’s to get a reaction, which doesn’t come. 

“Ten o’clock,” Alex says. “Outside the coffee shop. I’ll meet you there. Thank you.” 

He turns, military smart, and leaves the bar. Michael watches him go. A few minutes later, he runs out on his bill. He wasn’t going much of anywhere, after all. 

He and Alex haven’t been alone in a room together since - and Michael’s brain helpfully rattles off these facts in a long line - Noah, since Maria, since Max, since Alex had looked at him and said, terrified and wired, _ I shouldn’t have left you behind when I enlisted. _

Weeks have passed in a blur with no change. Max is a martyr, Michael is a drunk, Liz has been imbued with a frighteningly intense focus powered by grief, Maria is furious at him, Rosa’s not dead and Alex - 

Alex is austere and serious and paranoid and holding everything together by the skin of his teeth. 

Michael sits in the back of his truck in the dark long enough to be sober enough to drive home, and then he dunks his head under the faucet. He sleeps a few fitful hours, dreams about his mother’s face and coordinates, wakes up thrashing. Tries to scrub the nightmare from his skin. Tries to piece together one more solution, one more step. 

And then goes to meet Alex. 

In a black jacket and dark jeans and hiking boots, backpack on, Alex looks like a tourist on a street corner when Michael pulls his truck up to the curb. 

“I got you a coffee,” Alex says, opening the door. He passes Michael the paper cup, which is warm and steaming. Even though it’s fairly early it’s chilly, and won’t get much warmer; New Mexico falls blend into winters seamlessly and snow is on its way. “Figured you’d need it.” 

“You look like you’re gonna go backpack around Europe,” Michael says, as Alex climbs into the truck and closes the door. He seats himself comfortably there, which Michael resents for some reason. His truck, his space, his rules. He never enforced any of those things with Alex and he’s not about to start now. 

Alex looks down at himself. “I’d put a little more effort in,” he says, and then looks out the window. Michael studies him from the corner of his eye as he drives. There’s still a certain precision and squareness to the tidy line of his haircut, his clean-shaven jaw. But it’s relaxing slowly, like the old band t-shirt that’s seen the wash too many times worn under his jacket. Michael’s not sure if he’s relieved by that, or nervous. 

He’d raged against the tendency that new, decorated Captain Manes with his regulation trim and his uniform seems to have for evaluating what other people think of him. Alex had always been watching people watching him. But he seemed to follow their rules for the first time, and that had been an almost physical shock. 

Michael can’t help but feel a little thrill of nerves at the prospect of Alex loosening the rules and shooting from the hip. 

“Buckle your seatbelt,” Michael says, and he swings the truck out of town. “Safety first, Manes.” 

Alex says nothing, just looks out the window. He doesn’t put his seatbelt on. 

They go west on the highway for fifteen miles, and then Michael pulls off onto an unassuming dirt road. The truck’s wheels complain as he pilots it over divots and uneven tread; he could probably have done something about the track years ago but it helps discourage casual visitors. They kick up dust as they go, the only indicator of travelers for miles around. The sky above them is cloudy and grey. Winter ever closer, and nothing’s changed. 

Another twenty minutes, closer to a half an hour because the road’s particularly bad. Michael parks the truck behind an outcropping of rock so nobody can see it from the road, and kills the engine. 

“What did Liz say you’d see?” he asks, because he can’t help it.

“She didn’t,” Alex says. He opens the door. “It’s there, right? You coming?” 

The nerves are a little justified. Alex strides purposefully away from the truck towards the cave, and Michael hurries to follow. He feels a little satisfied when Alex stops short, inside the entrance. “Holy shit,” he says. 

“Yeah,” Michael says. “Maybe she should have, huh?” 

“Well,” Alex is staring, “it’s kind of strange to know that Tom DeLonge is right about something.” 

Michael feels a little embarrassed. It’s like showing somebody your bedroom; more tactful if they don’t comment on the decor. At the center of the room, Max looks the same as always. 

Alex starts walking in a slow circle around the space. “You think you’ve seen everything and then - “ 

“You’ve seen one interdimensional CAT scan machine, you’ve seen ‘em all.” 

“Can I - “ Alex gestures at the pods, “I don’t want to make him uncomfortable.”

“He’s incubating,” Michael says. “Long as you don’t kick him or roll him down a hill, he’ll probably be fine. I mean, who knows. I was in there for fifty years and only turned out marginally fucked up.” 

“This is amazing.” Alex steps closer, bends at the waist to get a better look. “Do you know which one is yours?” 

“That one,” Michael points. It’s mostly a guess, but there’s a little intuition there too. He’s surprised when Alex puts his palm against it. 

“It’s warm,” he says, raising his eyebrows. 

“They’ve never turned off or changed color or anything. Unlimited power source somewhere. Not solar. Is this helping? Whatever you’re looking to find out?” He doesn’t want to sound defensive but can’t help it. Personal business is personal business, even when it’s glowing and clearly out of this world. Max had blown the lid off their secret the minute Liz Ortecho batted her eyelashes at him, but Michael’s never brought anyone to see this before. Never even considered it. 

He wonders vaguely how things could have been if he’d left rules and exceptions on the wayside ten years ago. Slammed Jesse Manes into a wall with his mind. Told Alex his secret sometime during that long, hot summer before he left town. 

He wouldn’t have, probably. But it bears considering. 

“I don’t know,” Alex says. “I’m trying to strong-arm my way through 75 years of encoded government files. Half of it’s bureaucratic nonsense, a good third of the rest is just conspiracy theory bullshit about lizard people and job security. And the rest is buried in encryption and red tape. I hoped seeing this for myself might give me a better idea of what to look for.” 

Michael’s had a mental picture of Alex sitting behind a huge wall of computers in fatigues, chewing a cigar and typing frantically, ever since he brought up cybersecurity as a line of work. He wasn’t expecting that to be quite so literal. “What is it you’re looking for, exactly?” he says. “Your family photo album?”

“Something that can help Max,” Alex says. “There are a lot of rabbit holes to go down, and Kyle and I are trying to cover a lot of ground. But that’s the priority. For you, for Liz.” 

He clears his throat. 

“Liz know you’re playing detective with Valenti?” 

“He’s not so bad,” Alex says. “That’s unfair. He’s holding me upright, most days.” 

“Oh, that’s how it is?” 

Alex shakes his head. He’s walked back around the room to where Michael’s standing and seems to notice, for the first time, the lawn chairs and Liz’s blanket and the stack of soft-spined novels sitting in the dust. He bends to pick one of them up, the one Michael was reading most recently.

“_ War and Peace?” _

“Tolstoy blows,” Michael says, abashed. “But it’s what he likes so I’ve been reading it out loud. It’s what you do for people in comas, or whatever.” 

“If I ever turn up brain dead it better be _ Welcome to the Black Parade _ on repeat. Or _ The Wasteland.” _

“Missed that album.” 

“T.S. Eliot. He was the premier pop punk frontman of the early 1920’s.” 

“Do you derive joy from being such an asshole all the time?” 

“Yeah, actually.” Alex smiles at him, a little shit-eating, and then he sits down heavily in the empty chair like he belongs there. “You come out here a lot?” 

“Sometimes.” Michael moves the books and sits too. “Liz does more. I don’t think she wants me to know how often she does.” 

They sit in silence for a minute. The wind is picking up outside the cave. Listening to it whistle makes Michael think about the nights when he’d take shelter in the cab of his truck with a storm going outside, grit rattling against the windshield but never getting in. Warm and safe in a place that was his and his alone, with the weather and the rest of the world outside. 

“How are you?” Alex says finally, breaking the silence. “Actually?”

“Oh, we’re doing small talk!” Michael rolls his eyes. “How’s work, Manes? How’s the family?” 

“Work is boring,” Alex says, dry. “They run out of things for you to do when you’re almost to the end and can’t be convinced to stay. We play a lot of mid-day ping-pong. I’m getting pretty good.” He mimes throwing a ball, hitting it with a paddle. “And my family is fucked. But you don’t need me to tell you that.” 

“That’s the understatement of the century, man.” 

Admit the chaos, the anger and crushing grief and the blur of whiskey and acetone that had swamped the first weeks after Max’s absence, Michael had barely had time to internalize the fact that Jesse Manes had spent a week and a half in the hospital, then summarily vanished. Now he thinks Alex was trying to shield it from him intentionally. But he and Alex hadn’t been speaking much, anyway

Alex shrugs. “It’s nice, in a way.” 

Only Alex would summarize the fact that his father was, and probably is, definitely trying to kill him as nice, in a way. 

“I always knew we stood on opposite sides,” Alex says. “But it was all internal, private family business. Now those lines are pretty clear. Nice to have something be black and white. I’m working on redefining that term, anyway. Family.” 

Michael’s aware in a sudden and physical way of their unfinished conversation from so many weeks ago. Alex, so nervous Michael had felt it radiating off him even with everything else happening, looking at him and spitting out _ I see my father - _

Michael’s afraid of the end of that conversation. He’s man enough to admit that to himself. He’d tried to outrun it, tried to derail it into something else - jealousy or betrayal or the guise of moving on. But it’s still there, lingering like an unset bone. His hand aches. 

Alex senses it too. He shifts, kicking his right foot out through the dust on the cave floor. 

“But I was asking about you,” he says. “You changed the subject pretty handily, Guerin.” 

“I’m - “ fine, the default fill-in. I’m fine, Jesus Christ I’m fine, don’t you all have bigger things to worry about than me? He’s lobbied this like a weapon at Liz, at Isobel, at Maria, even at Kyle fucking Valenti who keeps looking at him with the clinical eyes of a medical professional. 

“Tired,” Michael finishes. 

Alex nods. He looks tired too. Looks his age. “Yeah.” 

Michael opens his mouth. And the truth falls out. 

“And I’m angry. And I feel childish, I guess? Like I should be able to be the bigger fucking person but I can’t. Don’t think I’ve ever been angrier at Max in my entire life.“ Michael points across the cave, Max’s face just visible in the glow. He should look peaceful and relaxed in there, but he just looks dead. “How do you get angry at Sleeping Beauty? Shouldn’t be. But I am.” 

“Anger doesn’t have to be rational,” Alex says, like he’s reading from a psychology textbook. Michael wonders in a half-hearted way if he internalized that in therapy. “It’s how you feel. You’re not acting on it. That’s what counts.” He chews his thumbnail for a second. “I don’t really know him. Didn’t? Don’t. Both. But this is hurting Liz. And I don’t think he was very fair to you, over the years.” 

This gives Michael pause, for some reason. “Throwing your lot in with the Loser Club?” 

“Is it that surprising I’d take your side?” Alex raises an eyebrow. “Also, it’s the cage match of the century.” 

“Well now we gotta resurrect him just for the ticket sales. You missed all the stuff where he started throwing lightning around.” 

“Guess so.” And back to Noah - Maria - Max - Caulfield - Alex staring at him wide-eyed and saying _ I don’t even see myself, sometimes. _

So Michael keeps talking. 

“You missed out on a bunch of the highlights,” he says, “military service got in the way of the greatest hits. Maxwell Evans versus Michael Guerin! Alienkind’s dirtiest knock-down, drag-out pissing contests! Seems like that’s all we did, for ten years.” He shoves his hands into his hair, even though doing that will make it all stand on end later. “Like this, right? I try to do something impulsive, he jumps down my throat. I do something worse, to make him mad. He one-ups me, throws his weight and his badge and his moral compass around. I go low, he gets to be righteously offended and then we both can it when Isobel catches on. A pair of idiot monkeys doing the same dance over and over.“ Michael points across the room again. “Guess he finally figured out the one thing that would let him win for good. He did a couple things he knew I’d never forgive him for, and then the motherfucker died.” 

He’s breathing hard. He hadn’t meant to say all that, exactly. It had tumbled out the way things are always falling out of his mouth, ready to smash. 

“I don’t think he was very fair to you,” Alex repeats, tired and stalwart. They often seem to be here, Michael angry and Alex just tired, or Alex tense and ready to snap, Michael covered in his own blood. On the floor of Max’s house, he’d wondered if this was really the moment where he’d never see Alex again and then Alex had been there - _ I’m still fighting his battles, not mine _\- and that had been worse. 

“He knew about us, you know,” Michael says, because sometimes when he’s hurting the only instinct he’s got is to hurt back. Alex inhales, then exhales slowly with control. “Me, anyway. That you were like - “ his Liz, but Michael doesn’t say that, “ - that you mean something to me. Not the details but the idea. He knew for a decade and he never said anything about it. Not even when - when you got hurt. Not until he could throw it in my face.” 

Alex’s hand lands, unexpectedly, on Michael’s knee. It makes him jump. Alex’s knuckles are white. 

“I miss him so much,” Michael says, small, “and I know if it were me in there he’d know what to do to fix it because that’s what he does. And I’m so angry.”

Being both things at once makes him want to crawl out of his skin, become something feral and mean with no connections and no ground control waiting for him to crash land. 

“If I were a better person,” Alex says slowly, “I’d give you some advice about letting go of your anger and breathing in karmic harmony. But I’m not. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being angry. Bring him back for Liz’s sake, or for yours, and then be as angry with him as you want. Then you get the satisfaction. It’s worth waiting for.” 

Alex Manes never ceases to surprise him. Michael laughs, a little harshly. 

“Getting even is the best revenge?” 

“Oh no,” Alex says. “Go low. Revenge for the sake of it.”

“You’re wily, Manes.” 

“I know a thing or two,” Alex says, “about playing a long game.” 

That feels like a confession, suddenly. Alex’s hand is still on his knee. And Michael wants suddenly and completely; wants so badly that he doesn’t know what to say next. It would be easy to act. That’s a language Michael knows, the one he’s good at - words for the feel of them, and action for the joy of it. Throwing a punch. Giving a kiss. He’d wanted to assume that Alex understood that intention but now he knows that hasn’t always been true. 

Alex seems to sense this too. He removes his hand from Michael’s knee, clears his throat. Michael expects a pleasantry so he moves forward and catches Alex’s hand. 

Alex closes his eyes. His grip hurts for a second, and then he lets it go and returns Michael’s hand to his own knee. Not quite a rebuff, but also not an invitation. 

“I think I need to tell you something,” Alex says. The worst things start out that way. “I know we’re not talking about it, I know - I’ve been trying to be here and to give you space but it’s hard. When you look at me like that, it’s hard.” 

That’s not something Michael can control, exactly. And Alex had done that, two contradictory things. Six days after Caulfield - Noah - Max - he’d discovered Michael was sleeping with Maria. Alex’s eyes had been furious, his voice steady. He’d made a promise; “If you need me, I will be here. Until then, leave me the fuck alone.” Michael, drunk and angry and ashamed, hadn’t known what to say so Alex had left to go shoulder his family legacy. 

“I’ll have a talk with my eyebrows,” Michael says, bringing himself back to the present. 

“It’s not that,” Alex says. He frowns across the space, Max’s body and dust and the cave mouth. “I told you about how I found my family’s connection to Project Shepherd, but I didn’t tell you why I started looking.” 

“You saw a thread and you chased it,” Michael hazards a guess. 

“I wanted leverage,” Alex corrects. “I wanted to win against my father because I never got to. It didn’t matter what the secret was, I just knew it was something I could hold over his head.” 

He takes a deep breath, a steadying one. Michael’s aware he’s trying to control something about his voice - anger or emotion. He does that a lot. 

“You know what I was going to do, after I ran my father out of town?” 

“Throw a fucking parade and get drunk for a week?” Michael goes for light. Alex doesn’t take the bait.

“I was going to ask you out.” 

Ice drops into Michael’s stomach. Rooted to the spot, he can’t do anything but stare. 

“Like, that was on my to-do list. _ Buy milk. Uncover secrets. Destroy Dad’s distinguished military career, blow up the family legacy. Dismantle an extralegal military operation. Ask Michael Guerin out.” _Alex laughs a little wetly. “That was the thing, you know? I knew I was hurting you and I knew I’d never be able to look at you or breathe or think clearly with him looming over my head. Even when I was on the other side of the world, I couldn’t forget that for a minute. Do you understand that?” 

“Yeah, actually,” Michael says. “Except the threat is vivisection.” 

“And that’s the problem.” Alex looks at him for the first time since he started speaking. “I had him, his great secret. When there’s an obstacle interfering with your mission, you remove the obstacle. But the secret was - it was you.” 

“Surprise,” Michael says. The jazz hands probably take it too far, but he can’t help himself. 

“You have this way of making me think that anything’s possible, even for a minute. I mean - space travel. Magic. The laws of physics don’t apply anymore. But that’s not the world that I’m part of. When I make decisions without all the facts, people get hurt. I need every angle, I need to understand the data. You’re always ten steps ahead of me and I’m afraid I’ll never catch up if you don’t stop.” 

“Then I’ll run in circles,” Michael says. “You know it’s what I’m doing, anyway. Better than throwing myself into a wall.” 

“I can’t live like you live,” Alex says. “I can’t leap without looking. I don’t have two legs to catch me, anymore.” 

Michael doesn’t really want to live that way. He’s never have the liberty of time. Acting first, acting fast - taking what he wants before it’s taken away because it’s never going to last, nothing ever does. Old habits die hard. And being the first one to throw a punch usually means you go down swinging. 

“That’s probably wise,” he says, calm as he can. “Gotten into a lot of trouble, living like that.” 

“Don’t I know it,” Alex says. “But you’ve gotten out of a lot, too. That’s the part I seem to get stuck on. But I don’t know how else to be.”

“What are you saying?” 

“I’m saying,” Alex says slowly, “that I meant everything that I said. But I need some time. To come up with a plan, to see the bigger picture. You need to help Max and I need to be sure that nobody is going to hurt your family again.”

“Fuck Max,” Michael says, even though he doesn’t really mean it. Across the cave, Max doesn’t react. Michael can get as angry as he wants and Max still doesn’t react. First time in both their lives that’s been true. 

“Still not any good at lying, Guerin.” 

“You’re always saying things like that,” Michael says. “Need and want. They’re not the same thing. I would know. I got by on need for a long time and nobody ever asked me what I wanted.” 

A memory, then - Alex, eighteen, eyes bright in the back of his truck with the sky big and clear above them. _ Are you sure you wanna do this? _ and _ Tell me what you want _like it was natural to ask that question. Michael’s wants are all-encompassing and as big as that sky. Impossible things. Alex Manes and a one-way ticket to anywhere. 

He pushes that away. 

“What do you want, Alex?” Not many people have asked him that question either. And Michael can, even though he’s afraid of the answer. 

Alex reaches for him and Michael still can’t move, doesn’t until Alex touches the side of his face. “I want this to not be the longest conversation we have that doesn’t devolve into something else,” he says. 

“Asshole.” Fondness feels dangerous. 

Alex’s laugh is a shadow. “I want - I want to know your story when you’re ready to tell it. I want to stop worrying. I want to be here for you if you need it. But I don’t know how to do that and also figure out where I stand.” 

“You want time.” 

Alex nods. The muscle in his jaw moves. And Michael makes a decision.

“Okay,” he says. He touches Alex’s hand, still on his cheek. Then he stands up. Maybe he does jump first, swing without looking, break the speed limit just to see what hell he’ll raise when he does. But he can be patient too. He’s waited ten years, after all. Longer. “But - promise me something.” 

Alex nods again. “Yes,” he says, like it matters that he says it out loud. 

“Whatever conclusion you come to,” Michael’s words feel gritty and unwelcome but he says them anyway, “however long it takes, you tell me. Even if it’ll hurt me. I’m a fully grown man-shaped-humanoid. I mean, probably. I can handle it. Don’t leave me hanging without a reason this time.” 

Alex looks up at him. He swallows. “Promise,” he says. His eyes are very dark. 

“Come on,” Michael says. “It’s gonna get cold as hell out here. Maxwell’s not going anywhere.” 

Alex stands, a little stiffly. Michael wants to offer his hand but he doesn’t. He just watches as Alex shifts his weight carefully from one foot to the other. 

“I’ll run you back to your car,” Michael says, like they’ve been discussing the weather. He feels unworthy of hope but uncomfortable with despair.

“Yeah,” Alex says. “Thanks. I have to go babysit four different encoding programs. Kyle can remove a bullet from someone’s spine in his sleep but he doesn’t know a thing about computers. Or cybersecurity.”

“Not to defend him but I think that’s just you.” 

Alex laughs, not lightly exactly but with genuine amusement, and he walks back towards the truck. 

Every time Michael leaves the cave, he finds himself thinking that the next time he enters it he’ll be getting it right. For some reason, the world hasn’t stomped out his optimism entirely. It’s a character flaw.

“See you, Max,” he says in the silence. And then he follows Alex out towards the car. 

They don’t talk much on the drive back into town. Or the next day, or the next week. In a crowd of people at the bar, Michael tries not to look Alex’s way but he can feel Alex looking at him anyway. Considering. 

Because Alex promised, after all. 

He holds onto that word in his mind as hard as he can. Because - for now - it’s what he’s got. 


	6. Flagstaff - 2019

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Flagstaff - 2019

“This thing,” Michael says in disgust, “to put it delicately, is fucked seven ways to Sunday.”

Alex sighs. “That’s what I thought you’d say. And you have a way with words.” 

The junkyard in early spring isn’t any nicer than the junkyard any other time of year, but at least it’s not hot out. It doesn’t get any nicer, or any worse. Alex’s giant hulking SUV is definitely lowering the property value, though. 

Alex, leaning against the side of the car looking frustrated, is helping that a little. He’s in running tights and jogging shorts and a hoodie, like he came from the gym, and his hair is sticking up all over the place. But even his presence can’t counteract how much Michael hates his stupid car. 

“Can you fix it?” Alex asks. He looks more irritated, which is a good look for him, and slightly desperate, which isn’t. “It’s just a rattle, right? It can’t be that big a deal.” 

“I can fix anything,” Michael says. He had been doing oil changes when Alex had pulled up half an hour before and, predictably, had dropped everything to focus on his stupid car. “If I have the right part, or enough time anyway. It’s something in the carburetor.” 

“Can you, I don’t know, put a new one in?” 

“Didn’t you fly planes for a living? They’ve got an engine too. Should know it’s not that simple.” 

“Helped develop code to navigate them. Saved the actual construction of the things for people smarter than me.” 

That’s almost a compliment. Michael wipes his hands on a rag. “I’ll have to make some calls for the right part. Get it mailed from Albuquerque. Couple days?” 

“Could I drive to Albuquerque and have someone fix it there?” Alex looks even more irritated, and more desperate. “I need it tomorrow.” 

“You are not,” Michael points accusingly, “driving that thing to Albuquerque. What part of fucked don’t you get, man?”

“Great,” Alex says. He kicks the tire with his good foot, winces and rubs his ankle. “Just great.” 

Michael can’t help smirking, just a little. “You put this off a little, huh.” 

“Rub it in, why don’t you.” Alex throws himself down on the lawn chair in front of Michael’s trailer. Michael likes the way he does that, looking before dropping down like he doesn’t trust the chair to catch him. He also likes how Alex feels at home enough to throw himself into the rickety lawn chair in the first place. They’ve been working at something close enough to friendship, or at least camaraderie, and it’s not the first time Alex has come out to the trailer for a conversation or a beer, as cautious and halting as those things might be. 

He’s never actually used a car as a pretense, so Michael thinks this is serious. 

“I can’t resist softballs,” he says, and sits too. “What’s the big rush anyway?” 

Alex’s eyebrows pinch together. “I’m supposed to drive that thing to Arizona,” he snaps, glaring at the car, “tomorrow. And now it’s making a sound like it’s possessed by the child of Satan. I know they used to make jokes about me and demon worship, but it’s a step too far. So everything is just great.” 

“Should’ve done a better job throwing those virgins into the volcano. What’s in Arizona?” 

“Nothing, an errand,” Alex says automatically. Then he amends himself, which is surprising. “My mother.” 

That’s about the last thing in the world Michael was expecting. Hearing that Meteor Crater was an alien crash site and Alex was shopping for a new extraterrestrial boyfriend would have made him stare less. He can’t really recall Alex ever mentioning his mother, except in passing. She’d skipped town, or left, or something. Michael can’t blame her, considering who she had been married to. 

Alex seems to recognize this too, because he’s chewing his lip. Maybe it’s his expression that makes Michael say it. 

“You can drive my truck,” he volunteers. “I mean, so long as you don’t take off in it. I’ll borrow Isobel’s car or something.” 

“I can’t drive your truck,” Alex says. “It’s nice of you to offer. But I can’t drive something without a hand brake installed. Emergency braking is kind of hard without nerve endings in your toes.” He wiggles his right foot rather stiffly. 

Foot, mouth - classic Michael Guerin move. That’s what he’s thinking when he says what he says next. 

“Well then I’ll drive you, in my truck. I’ll take you there.” 

Alex blinks at him like he’s grown a third head. Michael fights the urge to check, makes himself look back, suddenly all over in a cold sweat. 

“To Arizona, Guerin. Flagstaff, Arizona. Not down the street and not a day trip. It’s a weekend, probably.” 

“Sure, whatever,” he says. It’s like watching his own body leap into the conductor’s seat of a train and pilot it cheerfully right over the edge of a cliff. “I mean, I got no other plans.” 

“Guerin, I can’t ask you to - “ Alex’s mouth works soundlessly, apparently unable to comprehend what Michael’s suggesting, “it’s my mother and things with her are complicated. I’m not gonna ask you to come along for that after - you don’t have to. It’s fine. I’ll figure something out.” 

Michael catches on a little to what Alex is hinting at; sometimes when Alex is afraid of saying something specific he’ll talk at it. Michael talks around things, until other people get the point. Bad habits. Alex is worried it’s going to be upsetting, the way considering the connections between mothers and sons probably is for somebody who’s recently lost a parent. 

Michael has recently lost a parent. It feels bizarre to think about it in those terms, mundane ones that conjure up funeral black and well-wishes. Sometimes, the loss feels muted and clinical - she was a person, or something close to it, that he didn’t even know and barely remembered. Other times, it feels like falling out of the sky all over again. 

For months, Michael had mostly just tried not to think about it at all. But it’s catching up with him little by little. 

“If your backup plan is to ask Valenti,” Michael says, going for disdainful, “he’s got a real job that makes him kinda busy. Also, he’ll probably cry if he thinks about estranged parents for too long. And my truck’s got more leg room than his Beamer.” 

Alex exhales sharply. “It’s nice of you to offer but I can’t ask you to.” 

“You haven’t,” Michael says. “I’m volunteering. It’s obviously important.” 

Alex stares at him for a long moment. Michael thinks some of the shadows around his eyes have dissipated, but that could just be the fading of the winter. His own face feels fuller and less pinched as spring turns the world over. He can tell the difference in himself, a little. 

“It is important,” Alex says, finally. “If you’re sure.” 

“Why not?” Michael feints casual. 

And Alex smiles, suddenly. There are new lines around his eyes that crease when he does. “We could go see the Grand Canyon,” he says, almost shyly. “Have you? I know it’s been years.” 

Michael catches air for a moment, the memory of a conversation suddenly so clear and crisp. Something that wasn’t quite a promise, but wasn’t a joke either. 

“No,” he says. “I never got around to it. Only big hole in the ground I’ve seen recently’s a collision site. And Max’s ego.” 

Alex laughs, and he also doesn’t turn down Michael’s offer of a ride back into town which Michael takes as win. He’ll take them where he can, because when you win a few hands it’s only a matter of time before somebody starts to cheat. 

\---

The thing is - Max came back from the dead, and that didn’t really resolve anything. 

It did in some ways. It resolved the worry, and the pain caught in the corner of Liz Ortecho’s mouth that had hurt Michael the way Isobel’s pain hurts Michael too, something external that he can still almost feel. And Max is back, of course, sleeping a lot and apologizing a little and generally being a pain in Michael’s ass again.

Michael had missed him.

And he’s still angry. 

He’d been surprised to discover Liz is angry too. She’d hidden it well in her own determination and despair, but Michael sees it clearly when she looks at Max that she’s waiting for the right time to let him have it. She loves him, and she’s biding her time. A scary combination. 

So Liz is angry, and Isobel isn’t sleeping very much, and Rosa is still alive and not handling that well, and Maria is worried about losing the bar, and Alex and Kyle Valenti are trading a lot of weird inside jokes and sleepless nights doing God knows what, which Michael is trying very hard not to feel petty and jealous about. 

For the first time in his life, Michael is trying to find an equilibrium. He doesn’t exactly know what that looks like. 

He hadn’t exactly expected Alex to throw open the door to his trailer the day, or the week, of Miracle Maxwell’s return to the living and breathing. It’s an easy fantasy to trip down. Alex, throwing open the door to his trailer and spilling confessions - but that’s not realistic, Alex doesn’t spill anything unless his back is against a wall, so Michael edits the highlight reel. Alex moving with action - a kiss, the kind that you remember for a long time. But that’s not it either, not really. They were always good at falling into bed together without thinking it through. 

But Alex doesn’t throw open the door to his trailer. 

Six months ago, eight years ago, Michael would have let that turn into resentment, more evidence in the pattern of how Alex turns and walks away, every time, and Michael lets him. 

But - that’s not it either. Not really. Maybe Michael is just tired of bitterness. But Alex is still there, still present and still looking. He asks after Max’s wellbeing, and he plays rounds of pool in the bar on Thursday and wins handily except when Michael cheats, and he takes Maria dancing on the weekends. When, in passing, Alex mentions the shingles falling off the roof of the cabin he’s living in, Michael volunteers himself to fix them. Afterwards, they drink beer on the porch and watch the sun set. Michael holds his breath, and Alex doesn’t move any closer. 

But he’s still looking. He’s waiting, or thinking. Biding his time.

Until the rattle in his carburetor, anyway. 

\---

“What on earth’s got you making that face this early in the day?” 

Maria raises both eyebrows at him across the bar countertop. Midafternoon and the place is quiet before the inevitable evening parade of drunks. Maria is cleaning glasses with a rag and she tilts her head to peer at him when Michael drops his forehead onto the bar. “You look like somebody stole your wallet, or kicked your puppy.” 

“I’d prefer that.” The bar countertop is cool against his forehead. There’s something telling about how he finds that comforting. “This is just regular idiocy, served up by yours truly.” 

“So, a day ending in Y.” 

“Feeling the love, DeLuca,” Michael grumbles. “As always.” 

“Take what you can get, Guerin.” 

Michael looks up at her from under his hair and she grins. Michael doesn’t know exactly how they managed to settle into something more comfortable than the place they started, but they have. He’s learned not to question good luck too much in its rarity. It was good for a minute, then truly awful for another, and then uneasy for longer after that. But Maria - powered by her own encompassing love for Alex Manes and the moral authority of getting to be the bigger person - took the leap, made Michael pay his bar tab, and decided they were going to get along. 

Michael doesn’t have it in him to feel condescended to about it. Considering everything, he’s really just thankful for her friendship. 

Even so, he’s not exactly sure how much she wants to hear about his current impulse decision. They haven’t avoided the topic of Alex and him-and-Alex exactly, but Michael also hasn’t rushed to bring it up. 

“Oh it’s nothing,” he sighs. “Nothing a free drink won’t cure, anyway.”

“I’ll give you a discount.” 

Michael puts his hand over his heart, wounded, but he accepts the watered-down whiskey anyway. 

“So that means it’s - what?” Maria flips her hair over her shoulder and raises her eyebrows, no nonsense. “You mean an alien thing? Or an Alex Manes thing?” 

Michael doesn’t tell her that, really, it’s both. “The second one.” 

Maria shakes her head, in a way Michael could swear is almost fond. “You’re not doing your discount drinks any favors if you think I’m still hung up on it. Not gonna break my heart, big boy. For the record, I got blackout drunk and cried on Alex’s very well-defined shoulder for a bit and that pretty much got you out of my system.” 

“It would take a bigger man than me to even dare,” Michael says, and Maria laughs. 

“You’re good in bed but you’re not that good.” 

“Yeah, I’m second-guessing my strategy of sleeping with people to actually befriend them.” 

“Jackass.” Maria reaches across the bar to flick his chin. They are better off in their mutual acquaintance, Michael thinks, with the tension removed from never having to wonder what she’d look like without a shirt on. “What is it, then? Spit it out.” 

“I, uh,” Michael sighs. “Promised that I would give Alex space. To process. Which I guess conflicts with the fact that I volunteered to drive him to Arizona to see him mom because his car is fucked and he can’t drive my truck.” 

Maria blinks. Wordlessly, she reaches for his glass and dumps more whiskey into it, then more ice. 

“That one’s on the house,” she says. “Buddy, are there neurons firing in your grey matter or does your head just exist to house good bone structure?” 

“Look in my ear and see what you spot in there.” 

“He really wants to go see his mom?” 

“Apparently.” 

Maria grimaces, and scrubs particularly hard at the countertop. “They don’t really talk. I mean, maybe that changed when he was overseas. Your kid gets his leg blown off, I’d hope that would mend some bridges but God knows. She and my mom were close, I guess, when we were kids. But - “ she pauses. “Sorry. Old drama. Everyone knows everyone’s business, and you don’t want to listen to me talk about our parents I’m sure.” Her mouth gets tight. On Maria’s face, that expression passes the judgment her words leave out. Her expressions are usually so open and real. 

Michael thinks about it more than he should, probably. It’s like pressing into a bruise before it can really start healing, yellow and uncomfortable. People carry the impact of the places and people that made them everywhere they go. Maria’s a perfect example, her mother’s kindness and intuition and common sense stamped into her face, her voice, the rings on her fingers and the way she decorates the bar. Looking at them together, you can see the through-lines - who came first and how that shaped what followed. For her, that’s a good thing. 

When Alex was seventeen, Michael had so admired how he made himself stand contrary to the things everybody else stood for. Not just his father but the whole town, how it valued niceties and kitsch on the surface but sameness and comfort underneath. _ Spit on me and I’ll spit back, _is what Alex’s face had always said then. Himself, Michael had wanted to stop anybody from looking at him too hard. Til Alex, of course. 

He thought that had changed, something Alex grew out of along with the cheap hair dye and the eyeliner. But recently he’s not so sure. 

Michael even sees it in Max and Isobel - reflections of the Evanses in their mannerisms and habits, likes and dislikes. Max buying expensive whole-wheat bread in the supermarket, and forgetting to lock his front door because things stolen can be easily replaced. Isobel’s carefully constructed glamour so like the woman who raised her. 

Look at Michael Guerin; he comes from nowhere, and nobody watches out for him. He’s a self-made man so there’s nobody else to blame. 

But everybody comes from somewhere. From something. Just as they ought to be going towards something, too. 

“Guess I’ll know when I meet her,” Michael says, instead of saying any of that out loud. 

“People change.” Maria shrugs. “Sometimes even for the better. Don’t give me that look, Guerin. You’re living proof.” 

“I’m not.” Alarmed at how sincere this is getting, Michael rattles the ice in his glass to stave it off. It doesn’t work. Maria raises her eyebrows. “Knock it off, DeLuca. Come on.” 

“I’ve got your number, pal. It’s too late for you. You’re a romantic. And more than that - “ she swipes the rag at his elbows and Michael lifts them, obliging, “you’re fucked.” 

Maria DeLuca, Michael thinks, is the worst woman in the world. At least she would be, if she wasn’t also summarily right all the time. 

\----

It’s a total of five hundred and fifteen miles between Roswell and Flagstaff, Arizona. Six a.m. sunshine makes Michael’s windshield bleary and spotted; he flips the wiper fluid on and watches the dirt get wicked away as Alex dumps his bag and cane and crutches into the back seat. 

“I have breakfast burritos,” he says, yawning. Dressed in shorts and an Air Force sweatshirt, he’s still got bedhead. Michael had slept for a few hours before giving up so he’s dressed in jeans and a flannel and he’s awake, mostly. 

“Just so you know,” Michael says, “I cannot listen to men in eyeliner wailing all day so I hope you made a real playlist.” 

“What about the Dixie Chicks?”

“What? No.” 

Alex grins a little, flipping his sunglasses down over his eyes. “Let me lock up,” he says, and walks back towards the cabin. It looks tidy with the new shingles highlighted in the spring sun, all by itself on a wide stretch of land. Michael knows how it feels, a little bit. 

He’s empathizing with a house. Either he’s really losing it, or he’s finally growing the heart Maria keeps wondering at the existence of. 

“I would settle for some Johnny Cash,” Alex says, returning to the truck. 

“That’s what they call a compromise, Manes.” Michael waggles his eyebrows through the window. 

“I can be a diplomat,” Alex slides into the passenger seat. “I’ve flirted with people in eleven different countries.” 

Michael takes a deep breath. Five hundred and fifteen miles. He starts the engine and they drive towards the sunrise. 

Roswell to Albuquerque first; 285 to I-40. He drives the speed limit out of town, then disregards it until the first stretch of road typically patrolled by police. Michael’s driven this way enough to know. The truck wheezes but keeps pace, still well-cared for. They listen to _ The Junkie and the Juicehead Minus Me _on a disc that skips a little and the silence is something close to comfortable. 

“What’s so important, then?” Michael asks, a couple hundred miles in. By midday Michael had relented to Alex’s stack of CD’s. He’d started with Dolly Parton, which wasn’t so bad, but Michael was pretty sure they’d be moving into teenage angst territory before long. 

Nostalgia’s a bitch, but when you make out to _ American Idiot _more than once the connotations aren’t all bad. 

“Don’t disrespect Dolly.” Alex has his right leg propped up on the dashboard. Michael’s never seen him wear shorts so the prosthetic is visible before now, and he’s pleased at the realization that Alex probably doesn’t care what he sees. 

“I wouldn’t dare. I mean about the trip. Seeing your mom. She doesn’t have a phone?” 

“She does.” 

“DeLuca says you don’t talk much.” 

“Maria should mind her own business,” Alex says mildly. Even through everything, he still talks about Maria with an unshakeable tenderness. “I’ve asked her to take a look at something, and she said it was best done in person.” 

“Like a boil?” 

“Don’t be gross.”

“A big, cancerous boil on your knee?” 

“I found a cache of data from the mid fifties,” Alex says. “In an abandoned R&D site east of Farmington. It’s all encoded, and I’m hoping she’ll be able to help me.” 

“Your mom speaks crazy military jargon? Thought that was your schtick.” 

“Guerin,” Alex says, like he’s humoring him. “They’re encoded in Navajo.” 

“Your mom speaks Navajo?” Alex just looks at him sideways. It’s not quite annoyance, and it’s also not the expression of fond exasperation that Michael covets. A little irritable, a little tired like he’s had this conversation before. And Michael adds things together, like an idiot. “Google translate doesn’t work for that?” 

“Not so much,” Alex says. “And I wouldn’t trust it for this, if it did. I speak four languages but that is not one one them.”

“Sarcasm doesn’t count as a dialect, Manes.” 

“My grandfather was a Code Talker,” Alex says, both continuing his thought and really answering Michael’s question. “Went to the White House to meet Clinton and everything. He died when I was a kid but Mom always talked about him. It’s how they met, Mom and Dad. Military families. Two grandfathers and they were worrying about different things in the 1940’s.” 

“Maybe you should’ve chosen to trot along after those family footsteps instead,” Michael says. 

“The footsteps that ended up at Iwo Jima?” 

“At least you’d be able to speak something useful.” 

“I never really learned,” Alex says, rueful. “By the time I was old enough to realize I wanted to, my parents had already split. Well, Mom left and then they split. Flint and I used to make a lot of pretty offensive jokes about hidden Indians. It’s not really funny now. Looking at a language that should have meaning and just seeing patterns.” 

Michael’s people wrote in a language he’s barely begun to reconstruct. It had looked like gibberish, until he’d known what to look for. Minus the telepathy.

“Don’t even know what to call mine,” he says, which gets the point across. “I’m sure it’s got a name but hell if I know what it is.” 

Alex stops moving, holds himself still which is an indication that he’s listening intently, or weighing the right thing to say. 

“I’ve been wondering,” he says carefully, “what you remember. From the crash, from before.” 

Michael flexes his hands on the steering wheel. Dolly is singing something twangy on the radio, and the car is warm and safe and speeding along at 75 miles per hour. Alex keeps asking him questions like that. He wants to hear Michael’s story, when Michael is ready to tell it. 

“What’s to recall? Tearing through the stratosphere. Big, nasty explosion. And then the fun really got started - but that was courtesy of the state of New Mexico. I did tell you I went to an exorcism, right?” 

Alex makes the face he makes when he’s humoring Michael and annoyed by it. 

“I mean, couldn’t not go to my own exorcism. Don’t think it worked. The demon I cohabitate with and I are still pretty cozy.” 

“Please,” Alex says, “do not say that the demon is your penis.” 

“I wasn’t gonna but I will now,” Michael is delighted. 

“I’ll leap out of this car. I could do it, too. I’ve jumped out of helicopters.” 

Michael weighs his words. It’s easy to imagine himself as an archaeologist, digging through the ruins of some vast history with no textbook evidence to guide him. That makes it sound more romantic than it is, and less mortifying. Digging through the remains of what he should, by rights if his life had been something different, know as intuition. Michael wasn’t expecting that feeling to be echoed by anybody else, even a little. 

“Sometimes it’s just this big, noisy space in my head,” he says, staring out the windshield, “and sometimes something comes through. Like the translation’s wrong. Images, or impressions. I don’t know.” 

“Sounds like you could use a cipher,” Alex says, smiling. 

They cross the Arizona state line through a town called Window Rock, west of Gallup. The land is red sandstone and the early green of trees in spring. The road cuts through a line of cliffs with one perfectly round hole through which they can see blue sky. Alex points at it as they pass. 

“It’s called _ Tségháhoodzání, _” Alex says, pronouncing the word slowly. “Someone just called it Window Rock, in English. It loses something in translation.” 

“Most things do, right?” Michael asks.

“In my experience,” Alex says, and doesn’t say anything more for a while. 

\---- 

It’s late afternoon by the time they make it to Flagstaff. Michael can feel the gain in elevation in his lungs somewhere and see it too, desert reds and purples slowly overtaken by dark green pines and brush. There’s an edge to the air when he cranks the window down, something crisp that still tastes like the end of winter. 

A huge welcome sign along the highway proclaims it to be the_ World’s First International Dark Sky City. _

“There’s a big observatory here,” Alex says. “Where they discovered Pluto. You could check it out if you’re interested. This might take some time. It’s been a while since Mom and I have seen each other and you don’t exchange favors with people without doing the niceties first.” 

He drums his fingers on his knees, an old rhythm. One, two, three, four five - six - something syncopated and then quiet. 

“You nervous?” 

“You can tell?” 

“I’ve seen it once or twice,” Michael says, and he hopes Alex can tell that’s not a condemnation. That it’s almost a compliment. Michael shows his belly by getting as close as he can to something without getting burned. Alex releases a hold on self-assuredness. It’s private, like a kiss. 

“Guess so. Take a left here.” 

Alex’s mother is nothing like Michael expected; he hadn’t had any clear image really, had never really considered it in almost eleven years. Everyone comes from somewhere, but Alex had never mentioned her. The thought makes Michael feel weirdly guilty, an implication that Alex’s existence begins and ends with Jesse Manes. 

Alex reads directions off his phone; down a main street, past the university, over train tracks and into a neighborhood full of small, well-kept one story houses that look historic. Michael parks on the side of a street without sidewalks, and when he looks towards the doorway there’s a woman waiting in the window. 

When Alex gets out of the car, he stretches so his whole back pops. He leans heavily on his cane to cross the street and he takes a very deep breath before he knocks. 

Michael gives himself a once-over before following. He’s sweaty and tired and smells like he’s been sitting in a car for seven hours, and he’s about to meet Alex’s mother. 

Maybe this is a bad idea, after all. 

Michael follows Alex to the house anyway. 

Alex’s mother - Lea Hathale, she crisply says she removed the other last name from hers years ago - is compact and efficient with a dark bob streaked grey and the kind of gaze that can split an atom. Alex’s eyes, Alex’s brows. She treats Michael with a long look and then shakes his hand when Alex says “My friend, Michael Guerin.”

“Michael Guerin.” She says his name like she’s memorizing it. “What do you do, Michael Guerin?”

“I’m a mechanic,” Michael says. “Mostly.” 

Lea nods. “Good thing to be,” she says. “Fixing things, good thing to do. You worried your car’s going to stop running, baby?” 

“Something like that,” Alex says. He’s hovering next to a dark scrubbed wooden kitchen table, in the center of a tiny but organized kitchen. The whole house is like that, small and filled to the brim with things, but organized. Michael can get a glimpse of who this woman is through the things in her house, which he likes. 

“Your cousin Bobby’s a mechanic too, you know that? Has his own business in Tuba City.” 

“I don’t know a cousin Bobby.” Alex’s mouth twists, amusement maybe. 

“Well, he’s not really your cousin. And he’s an idiot, so hopefully Michael Guerin is less of a cheapskate. Want a coffee? Alexander, sit down before you fall down.” 

“I’m fine,” Alex says, and winces. And then he sits down. 

“It’s hurting you,” Lea says, bluntly. She puts coffee cups on the table. Michael stretches his own back so his shoulders release, then sits down too. 

“Going to hurt me for the rest of my life,” Alex says. 

“Healing alright?”

“As well as can be expected.” 

It’s like watching a ping-pong match between two players with perfect hand-eye coordination and no tact. 

“There’s only one spare bedroom,” Lea says, pointing the spoon she’s stirred her coffee with at Michael. The ping-pong ball hits him square between the eyes. “Hope you’re alright with the pull-out couch. I was only expecting one visitor, and that one I was barely expecting.” 

“Ma’am, I’ll sleep in the back of my truck if it’s an imposition,” Michael says. 

“You will not. You know how cold it gets this high up? We could still get snow this time of year. I’ve been in Flagstaff five years and I’m still not used to it.” Lea nods decisively. “Also don’t call me _ ma’am, _Michael Guerin. I’m not married.” 

“Not anymore,” Alex says, behind her. He sips his coffee. 

“You have kids?” Lea directs this at Michael, who manages an alarmed look and nothing else before she keeps talking, “Watch yourself if you do. One minute they’re two years old and cute, and then you blink and they’re tall, snarky assholes.” 

Alex gives Michael a look, over the back of his mother’s head. “Nice to see you too,” he says out loud. 

Lea looks at him, leans her elbow on the table. “It is nice to see you,” she says, and Michael feels like he’s interrupting something. “I’ll order takeout,” she says. “Still can’t cook for shit. That hasn’t changed.” 

“Let’s go out,” Alex says. “I could use a walk.” 

They walk through the neighborhood to a pizza place a couple of blocks away; the town feels frenetic and busy and they wait in line for a while on the sidewalk. With his hat on and plaid shirt tucked in, Michael fits right in with half of the pedestrians and looks wildly out of place among the rest. Eventually, they get a greasy pizza; Alex orders a beer, his mom some kind of bougie sparkling water.

And then Alex and his mother start talking. 

It’s like watching a trade negotiation, or a delicate diplomatic strategy; Alex had made a joke about that but maybe he’d been literal. They talk in circles, not saying a lot. Alex listens, Lea listens, they trade off. They both listen to him when he speaks too, twin sets of eyebrows. Alex doesn’t mention why he’s come to visit. Lea doesn’t ask. 

She makes up the fold-out couch and Michael crashes on it, and when he wakes up they start in on it again. So Michael goes to the observatory, for a while. 

He returns in mid-afternoon, feeling spring wind-tousled and chilly, to find Alex asleep on the couch, somebody’s guitar on his lap. It’s such a familiar image that Michael pauses in the doorway for a long moment; Alex’s head is tipped over the back of the couch and the instrument’s sitting on his thighs like it had found its way there naturally. The little house is warm and close, and Michael kicks his boots off as quietly as he can. 

Lea is in the kitchen. She smiles at him when she spots him. “Coffee?” She asks quietly. “Can’t offer you a beer, I’m afraid. I don’t drink anymore. Buy some if you want but take out the recycling when you’re done.” 

“Coffee’s good,” Michael says. “I don’t want to impose.” 

“Nothing like that. Just a habit I kicked when I got divorced. Eventually. Took a little while.” 

“Slap me if I’m out of line,” Michael says, “but I’ve met Jesse Manes once or twice. He makes me want to drink too.” 

Lea pauses, and then she laughs and hands him the coffee cup. 

“That yours?” Michael asks, gesturing to the guitar. Lea nods.

“You play?”

“Sometimes.” 

“I taught him when he was small,” she says, something in her brusqueness slipping a little. Unaware that they’re watching, Alex snores a little. “I wasn’t sure if he’d kept playing.” 

“He kept up with it,” Michael says with certainty. “I think he carted a guitar all over the Middle East. I’ve seen pictures.” 

Lea looks at him sideways. “You from a military family? Don’t recognize the last name.”

“God no,” Michael says with appropriate horror. “Product of the New Mexico foster care system, thank you very much.” 

“I’m assuming,” Lea says, still looking at him, “that you’re here because you care about my kid.” 

She’s assuming something different than the specifics, but she’s also not wrong when it’s phrased like that. “You’d assume right,” Michael says. “I do.” 

“Couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. But he’s always been like that. Even when he was little. He’d be so serious and secretive and then you’d realize he was a playing a joke he was waiting for you to pick up on.” 

Michael thinks it’s been a long time since that was the reason Alex kept things to himself. 

“But I was never the person he told his secrets to,” Lea continues, like she read his mind. 

“I don’t know if anybody is,” Michael says because it’s the right thing to say. He amends that in his head though; Kyle Valenti, Maria DeLuca - and him, too. Some of them had just taken a long time. 

Alex has all of his secrets. It’s a byproduct of being one of them, for so long. 

“So serious,” she repeats. “Even as a baby. It’s strange to see it in a man. All my kids are grown up but he was my baby. You do something four times you think you’ll get it right, eventually. I don’t think I ever did.” 

This is dangerously close to something Michael is sure Alex wouldn’t want him to overhear but he’s not quite sure how to stop it. 

“Sorry,” Lea says, snapping back into terseness. “You didn’t come here to listen to me wax on about the past. Hard to avoid it when it’s staring at you, huh?” 

“He,” Michael says pointedly, “would probably say the same thing. He turned out alright, for the record.” 

“Mostly his doing.” 

“With Alex, most things are.” 

“That’s not really how things should be.” 

“I lost my mom recently,” Michael finds himself saying. He keeps looking pointedly at Alex’s sleeping face to avoid Lea’s reaction. “I didn’t really know her at all. Foster care, like I said. Complicated. And I met her once, before she died.”

“I’m sorry.” Her voice is gentle, awfully so. 

“Yeah. Thanks. I just - “ he’s not exactly sure what he wants to say, and he’s worried for a moment that he’ll cry, “I mean, you’re here. Right? And he still plays the guitar. So.” 

“You’re quite a character, Michael Guerin,” Lea says. Michael pushes away from the table. 

“I think I’m gonna take a walk,” he says unsteadily, and he does. For a long time. 

He comes back when the sun’s down, stops for a six pack and thinks a lot about family lines. 

Michael finds Alex standing in the hallway that leads from the main room and the kitchen to the two back bedrooms. With his back against the wall, he’s studying the rows of photos hung on the wall. Lots of them are landscapes and flowers but there are a cluster of faces, grouped together like they’re precious. 

Michael hands Alex a beer, and he lets his eye drift over the pictures for a second. A few old family photos, notably missing a father. Four boys, all grinning, and - one of them’s a shot of five kids in a field with their arms in the air. Michael definitely recognizes Kyle Valenti’s grin, even on a little kid’s face. There’s a photo of Alex as a teenager sitting on a porch somewhere with red dust and blue sky behind him. Wearing black. Not looking at the camera. 

“Thank you,” Alex sighs. Michael pops the beer tab; foam bubbles through the opening and he slurps it. “I’m sorry this is taking it’s time.” 

“Nah,” Michael says. “You said it might. I checked out that observatory.”

“What’d you think?” 

“Want to get me a big telescope like that.”

“For your next birthday. Better than committing grand larceny.” 

“I’ll pick it up with my brain and run. Size matters not.” 

“Mom said she’ll take a look at the documents tomorrow, but she might have to make some calls. Said something about driving to the rez too, ask questions from people who know more.” Alex rattles off facts. A status update. “It’s not a written language. Nobody ever needed it to be. It was transcribed into a code in the 40’s. Turned into something else it’s not, to win a war.” He pauses, eyes dark. “Anyway,” he says, “it’s progress. It’ll just take more time.” 

“That little old thing,” Michael says. “It’s only a universal constant.” 

“What makes you say that?” 

“Oh, astrophysics,” Michael waves a hand around, a mock spaceship landing. “Don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that. Special relativity, spacetime. It’s what they call a fundamental quantity, holds up regularities in nature. Still impacts those of us who are irregular, too.” 

“Maybe,” Alex says. He sips his beer. “If you’re assuming time is linear.” 

“Newton would beg to differ. So would Einstein, and Lorentz, and Maxwell, and probably Stephen Hawking.” 

“Probably, but I’m talking about conceptions that are a lot older than any of those people. Or a scientific journal. Time moves forward, events have a beginning and an end and once it’s happened, it can’t be revisited. It’s a very Western way of thinking about it. Well, we are in the West. European.” 

“I am not European,” Michael says, feeling annoyed. “In case you forgot the extraterrestrial bit. They probably measure time upside down, wherever the hell I come from.” 

Alex licks his lips. “If you’re going to make fun,” he says, “I’m not going to explain.” 

“I’m not, I just - “ Michael spreads his hands, “physics makes sense to me. Things that are measurable. When my people got that spaceship from there to here, they did it using time and entropy and energy. Not going in a circle. But, please. Explain.” 

“Time is cyclical,” Alex says. “If you’re Navajo. _ Diné. _You never have to worry you might have missed something, because if it was meant to happen to you it’ll come back around again. Time moves forward when you’ve completed what you need to finish. Everything happens in circles, not lines.” 

Michael thinks about coordinates, and geography, and the curving hull of a spaceship long smashed. Enormous pieces of it had stayed hidden until he’d gone looking for them. 

“What do mean,” he asks, “completed?” The visual of his mistakes rolling through his life on a wheel is unsettling. But then again - he’s sitting here with Alex. And their business is unfinished too. 

“It’s not as crazy as it sounds,” Alex says. “I mean - I think I’m living it. Everywhere I go, I’m already in my own way.” 

Michael sees it coming. Like a premonition. It’s written into Alex’s photographed face on the wall. 

“I said,” Alex says, “that you make me feel like a seventeen-year-old kid again. I wasn’t lying. But - “ his voice had been distant but it wavers suddenly, and Michael feels a surge of panic, unwelcome and sharp “ - I can’t even tell you the last time I felt the way I remember feeling then. I’m not seventeen anymore. You look at me and you see - “ another catch in his cadence, and Michael doesn’t want to covet that but he does, “ - the kid you fell in love with but I don’t know if he’s there. If I deserve to even say that, anymore.” 

He turns his face away and stares at the wall, his own childhood photograph. In profile he’s inscrutable. Michael likes him best when his face is complex, always has. It means something is going on behind it, even if that’s not a good thing in the long run. 

“I think you’re full of shit,” Michael says lightly. Alex turns and - there, his second favorite expression. Exasperation, irritation, fondness. Michael has it memorized but he never tires of the elation that comes from shaping Alex’s face that way. 

“What about me?” Michael asks. “When you’re looking at me, right now. Do you see somebody with nothing in common with the kid you fell in love with?” 

Saying those words feels like an act. They don’t fit right on his tongue but he says them anyway, demands that they do. It’s just physics. 

“Of course not,” Alex says that derisively. “You, I knew a tiny corner of what you are. Who you are. Now you’re the whole picture. It’s not the same thing.” 

“Cause you’re saying it about yourself, is why.” 

Alex bristles. It means Michael’s right. He wants to put his thumb and fingers into the tense hollow of Alex’s shoulder muscle and push. 

“I think I wanted to pretend,” Alex says after a moment, “that I could look backwards and have that be where we stand again.” 

Need and want aren’t the same things. People don’t ask Michael those questions either. Alex is, in his own way. 

“That’s not what I want,” Michael says softly. Alex doesn’t turn his head but his eyes move. Michael can feel them. “Maybe I thought it would be easier. And then I thought the right thing to want was something completely new. That wasn’t it either. It might seem surprising but I’m pretty good at realizing when I’ve fucked up.” 

“You don’t give yourself enough credit. Never did. But I could stand to hear that one again anyway.” 

“I’m an idiot,” Michael says. “And so are you, by the way, if you spent all this time thinking and have come to the conclusion that I look at you and see a stranger. You’re working with a biased hypothesis.”

Alex chokes on half a laugh. 

“Sorry for not consulting you first,” he says. He presses his thumbs into the corners of his eyes. 

Michael turns his face towards the picture frames on the wall. Seven-year-old Alex grins at them, unburdened. Fourteen-year-old Alex pulls a face at the camera. Eighteen-year-old Alex, his feet in the dust on the edge of a porch, looks past them and away. Michael wants to ask when that photo was taken but instead he just studies it. 

The particular stubborn set of Alex’s jaw - that hasn’t changed. The warm depth of his eyes and the shadow of his brows like a warning above them - that either. The set of his shoulders has shifted to be stronger and more sure, standing up against things instead of folding in away from them. But these are just facts of the body, and ten years has done it’s work on Michael too. That’s not really what he means. 

Alex’s intense concentration - the same. His unwavering moral compass. His tendency towards self-deprecation and how he defaults to terrible music, and how he spits out some words and sits on others. All the same. They’ve settled in new ways, ones Michael is still discovering. 

He wonders briefly what Alex might catalog about him, and wants to know that answer as badly as he dreads it. 

“Your mom and I had a conversation,” he says slowly. 

“Oh, God,” Alex groans. 

“I like her!” 

“You would. She thinks we’re, you know.” 

Together, Michael thinks what Alex doesn’t say. He wonders if Alex had corrected her. “Got that impression.” He clears his throat, sure of what he needs to say next and scared to. “It made me think of, uh. Of mine.” 

Alex’s head snaps over to him. 

“Your mother,” he says. Saying what Michael doesn’t say. Michael nods. 

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about it.” Alex says this tentatively, like stating the obvious will be upsetting. 

“You were right. I think I’m getting there.” It had felt too overwhelming, a waterfall over which Michael might tumble and never recover from. It’s not easy going now, but he thinks he can at least see the shore. 

He wants to tell Alex this. Telling Alex his secrets is easier than it should be, but twice as terrifying. Michael closes his eyes to say it in the dark. 

“All I had was a moment. I didn’t really meet her at all, just a moment. But - she saw me. Right into me. She saw who I am.” 

“I know,” Alex says. His eyes are so dark and so soft, when Michael opens his own. “I saw it on your face.” 

“And I saw her,” Michael continues, because it’s important that Alex understand this. “I didn’t understand it, not really. But I knew her too. That fast. I did. I do. That’s all it took.” 

He can’t say anything else. He wants to. Wants to explain how, every time he sees Alex, he knows him all over again, every change and every consistency. Wants to promise that will always be true. Wants to put words to what he’d learned and felt about his mother, even though the words simply don’t exist. 

“Michael,” Alex says. His fingers find Michael’s back and Michael feels himself pulled closer into the warm space between Alex’s shoulder and his neck. They breathe together there for a long moment in the dark and even though Michael didn’t voice it he thinks - he hopes - he’s found himself understood. 


	7. The Grand Canyon - 2019

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Grand Canyon - 2019

Michael sleeps in longer than he means to even on the pull-out couch. It’s about as comfortable as the mattress in his trailer, which he’s beginning to think he needs to replace. High elevation sunshine is bright and pointed, so he’s squinting when he opens his eyes. Alex, balanced on crutches without his leg on, is at the stove in the tiny kitchen. 

Michael shrugs his shirt on, mostly for posterity, and shuffles over to the kitchen table. Alex has bedhead, and Michael can tell he hasn’t shaved in a few days. Relaxed around the edges. 

“There’s coffee,” Alex says. He’s stirring something in a pan with one elbow resting on one crutch. “I’m making eggs if you want some.” 

Michael fake-gasps. “You’ve been cooking? Unsupervised?”

“I’m trying to learn. Got pretty tired of frozen dinners. You want some or not?” 

“I could eat.” Michael pours coffee into the mug Alex hands him; it’s got a smiling cactus on it. He adds milk because it’s there and he never drinks coffee with milk. Alex maneuvers around the tiny kitchen a little awkwardly; hip against the counter, he sets one crutch aside to stack eggs and tortillas on plates, then leans out to pass them to Michael. 

The eggs are pretty good. Michael adds salsa. Alex dumps hot sauce on his and rolls them into a burrito. 

“You gotta get back today?” Michael asks, food in his mouth. “Or what?” 

Alex raises his eyebrows. “Well,” he says, “I guess. Or we could go see the canyon. It’s just a two hour drive from here. It’s a little out of the way but - “ 

He sips his coffee and looks out the window. His mom’s place is close enough to the college that there’s foot traffic, twenty-something kids walking with purpose down the sidewalk outside. With the windows open, the air smells like pines and productivity. 

“Don’t wanna stuff you in a car for longer,” Michael says. “I have eyes, Alex. I can tell it’s not the most comfortable thing in the world.” 

Alex’s right hand flexes on his right knee. “I’ll lay down in the back seat. We should. You haven’t, and we said we would.” 

Over a decade ago, Michael thinks. Those kinds of promises aren’t supposed to stick so well. 

“Sir, Captain, sir,” he says, which makes Alex roll his eyes. 

“Anyway, I told Kyle I’d buy him a stupid souvenir shot glass or something,” he says. 

“Well nevermind, now we can’t go,” Michael grimaces, which makes Alex laugh. 

Michael waits in the car while Alex says goodbye to his mother. They speak in lowered voices in the doorway of her house, two sets of eyebrows and two pairs of hands shoved in pockets. She reaches out to touch Alex’s face and Alex lets her, closes his eyes for a moment. Watching that hurts a little, but Michael doesn’t really mind it. He can’t be envious of this, Alex’s closed eyes and the soft set of his jaw. 

“We’re going north,” he says, when he gets into the car, and Michael doesn’t ask for more details. 

They drive past the base of the mountain in Flagstaff, still dusted with white. It’s visible in Michael’s rearview mirror for miles after they pass it. The land opens up and levels out, the highway a long ribbon of asphalt cutting a line into the horizon. Alex does sit in the back seat for a while, laying on his back with his right knee pulled into his chest. Then he takes the prosthetic off and slides in between the seats to the front, his hand on Michael’s shoulder for a moment to steady himself. 

“You wanna crash the fucking car, man?” 

“Assuming you’re not driving me out here to kill me. Can we listen to _ Dookie _now?”

“If you put that album on I will kill you.” 

“You don’t even know what it sounds like. Do you?” 

Michael stands his ground, so Alex puts on some Flatt and Scruggs. Somewhere near Wupatki Michael relents, and Alex sings along to “When I Come Around” as they cruise into Cameron.

There’s an exorbitant entry fee at a booth stop that Alex pays, and a line of traffic that’s not as bad as it is in the summer, apparently, and the dance of finding parking made easier by the handicap parking pass Alex slaps into the window. By the time they’re getting out of the truck and maneuvering around tourists taking photos on the steps of the South Rim lodge, Michael is irritated and hungry and really wants to shove through somebody’s posed photo op. He follows Alex through the crowd; he cuts through a gift shop and out a back door into more sunshine, more tourists and a few crying children.

“Is it always this crowded here?” Michael complains, cursing as a woman with a stroller rolls over his foot.

“It’s worse, usually.” 

“They were selling t-shirts for twenty five bucks inside. A t-shirt. And rocks. I can pick rocks up off the ground.” 

“Then shoplift one. Michael. Stop complaining and look.” 

Because Alex is the one asking, Michael lifts his head. 

They’re standing on a pathway that runs right up close to the rim. Clouds roll in the sky and people move out of the way enough that Alex grabs his elbow and pulls him so he stubs both his big toes, through his boots, on a low stone wall that’s preventing them both from tumbling straight down. 

Michael looks. 

And he’s speechless. 

Wind whips his hair. The world stretches away from him, red-gold and stratified, waves of sandstone and time and water that plunge, beautiful and dangerous, towards canyons and cliffsides. He could stare for a hundred years and never run out of details. It’s the landscape of an impossible planet - but it’s not. It’s here, right here in front of him. Long before he was hurtled out of an uncompromising sky to ground it was here, and it will be long, long after he’s gone. 

Michael feels very small, and very young. He doesn’t mind it. 

“It’s something, isn’t it?” Alex says. Michael doesn’t have any words. He just looks with his mouth open. Around them, tourists pose and snap photos, squabble over loose change, wear expensive hiking gear. Michael can’t breathe. He just wants to stare. 

“I’ve been a lot of places,” Alex leans his hip against the stone wall that Michael is clinging to, resting his leg. “Thirteen countries, I think? You can’t really compare things to each other, it’s not fair. But I never get tired of this sight. Relatively, it’s right down the street.” 

How had he never come here, before now? Michael can’t answer his own question. Frankly, he’d never even considered it. Always looking skyward and resenting what was in front of him.

“You came here a lot?” He asks. 

“Sometimes. My mom always liked it. Hunter and Flint and Kyle and I hiked to the bottom once, after Hunter graduated from the academy. I was thirteen, maybe.” 

Michael tries to think about looking up at the sky from the bottom of the canyon. Stars framed by all that time and history, the impact of geography on the rock and the world. 

“Think you still could?”

“I’d have to go really slow,” Alex says. “Have a mule carry my stuff.” He touches Michael’s elbow. “Take your time. I’ll go get us some overpriced ice cream, and we can walk down the trail some if you want.” 

Alex turns and walks towards the lodge and the gift shop. He pauses, one hand in his pocket and the other resting on the cane he’s taken to using. Wind tosses his hair, dark in the sun, and his face is caught in the light for a moment like in the beam of a spotlight. Focused there to catch Michael’s eye. 

Something aches through the line of Michael’s whole body. It’s so intense in that moment that it should be frightening but it’s not. 

Alex turns his face towards the sun. Michael turns his face towards Alex. Past them, wind ripples along the edge of an incredible canyon. 

They do walk down the trail for a mile or two and Michael snaps photos, texts them to Isobel. He gets a good one of Alex, unaware, peering over the edge. She texts back something crude, which is a little shocking but a sign of her own good humor. The overpriced ice cream costs too much for what it is, but the view makes up for it. There’s a historic hotel, a museum full of ancient photos documenting two brothers on a raft. The sun is late afternoon low when Alex suggests parking in an unoccupied camping spot for a while and drinking the beer he stashed in the truck. 

Michael parks himself on the tailgate, breathes in pine and juniper with his eyes clothed as Alex pulls things out of the back seat. Like a Boy Scout, Michael thinks, always prepared. Alex opens the glass beer bottle with his keys and passes it to Michael. 

Pine and juniper and high elevation air. Birds call in the trees above them. Alex leans against the side of the truck and they look towards the rim of the canyon. The sun’s lit it red and gold and brown and purple and it's already filling with shadows underneath the edge. There’s going to be a tremendous Arizona sunset. 

“Keep an eye out for park rangers,” Alex says. “We aren’t exactly paying to park here and they’re sticklers about that.” 

“You’re a renegade, Captain.” 

“I fought the law,” Alex says, “and the law gave me a fine.” 

There isn’t really anybody else around, too early in the year for casual camping. Someone has a campfire lit in the distance and Michael can see the glow through the scrub, but he can’t see people. The lodge in the distance looks very far away. They might as well be alone together on the edge of the world. 

He takes advantage of that. Finishing his beer, he flips it upside down so suds train out into the dirt. And then he picks it up, without his hands. Glass refracts light as it hovers feet off the ground, and Alex laughs a little behind him. 

“When you do that,” Alex is looking at him like he’s marvelous, a magician pulling rabbits out of hats. “Do you know what I think?”

“It’s just physics,” Michael says, suddenly almost embarrassed. Max and Isobel don’t marvel at what Michael can do, haven’t since they were kids and it was all new and strange and exciting. It’s just another skill like knowing how to take an engine apart or being able to read a book in one sitting and summarize it well. Michael focuses, rotates the bottle to demonstrate. It tilts on its axis, a steady orbit in his mind. “Physics and electricity. I can feel the way it sits in space - in the air or in your hand. Just like I can feel how a lug nut’s supposed to fit on a bolt.” 

“The laws of physics are working with you,” Alex says, wry. “For most of us, they’re just knocking us over.” 

Nothing knocks Alex over for long, Michael thinks. He always gets back up again. It’s more than he can say for himself. 

“What do you think?” Michael flips the bottle upside down. Beer drips out of it. “When I do this?” 

“That anything’s possible,” Alex says. “Even for a minute.” 

That’s the timbre of his voice Michael years for the most, when he goes a long time without hearing it. Contemplative and real. His concentration slips. The beer bottle falls, and bounces on a rock. Alex laughs, and Michael ducks to pick up the pieces. 

“Put it in the recycling can,” Alex calls. “Be a civilized alien, at least.” 

Michael does. “Is this gonna be your hobby when you retire? Stand in the street and yell at kids to stop eating meat and take out their recycling?” 

“Maybe,” Alex says. “I don’t really know. I’m gonna get pretty good disability benefits, and I haven’t eaten meat since, like, 2009.”

“Moo,” Michael says, in his face. 

“I make pretty good veggie lasagna. You don’t even miss it.” 

“I would still know.” Michael hops up into the back of the truck so they’re side by side. It feels a little like testing fate, but Alex doesn’t move away or increase the distance. “Beautiful out here,” he says. 

“Gonna get dark soon. I didn’t really plan out a place to stay.” 

If he was alone, Michael would just sleep in the back of the truck. He shrugs. “What was that little town we came in through?”

“Tusayan,” Alex says. “I didn’t call ahead for rooms anything.” 

“We’ll figure it out.” Their knees are touching, Alex’s left and Michael’s right. It’s some kind of anchor. “We could before the sun - “ 

“Not in a hurry,” Alex cuts him off. Logical and rational Captain Alexander would get back into the cab of the truck as the sun gets lower, try to access the internet from his expensive phone and book two hotel rooms next door to one another. Michael watches as Alex lays down on his back to stare up towards the darkening sky. 

Michael marvels at how it can be possible to fall in love with the same person, a second time. 

“Alex?” 

“Hm,” Alex acknowledges him with a sound rather than a word. 

“Thanks for bringing me here,” Michael says. Before he loses the nerve he lays down too, his jean jacket rustling against the blankets that are permanent inhabitants of the pickup. 

“You’re welcome,” Alex says. “I mean, I said I would.” 

Michael wants to look at him but doesn’t risk it. “Wasn’t sure if you remembered that.” 

“I didn’t forget.” 

They watch the sky together in silence for a while. The morning’s clouds are almost gone, blown out into a clear night of stars and rustling stunted trees. The temperature slips by another few degrees. Everything smells like sage and distant campfire smoke. 

“Alex?” 

“Hm.” 

“I’ve got a better answer to what you were saying at your mom’s,” Michael says into the silence. Alex turns his face to look at him. His eyes are warm like the light on red canyon walls. “About changing.” 

“I remember.” 

“You’ve got a bad read on yourself, for the record. You are different but - it’s been ten years. If you weren’t, there’d be something wrong with you.”

“Other than the obvious,” Alex says, which is a Michael line. 

“Shut up and let me talk.” Michael has to say this. In the night’s silence, in the truck bed, it feels like the only opportunity. 

“Not stopping you.” 

“I still see you.” Michael turns himself further so his weight’s on his hip and his elbow, so his body curls in towards Alex’s like a secret. “The things I liked about you then I still like about you now. And there are new things that I’m still figuring out too. Some I like and some I don’t. I’m sure you can say the same. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since Max healed my hand.” 

Alex turns too, rests on his elbow so his feet are stacked one on top of the other. A balancing act. Michael’s heart is in his throat. He flexes his hand in between their bodies; Alex’s eyes follow the movement. 

“He thought I was carrying around this reminder of something horrible. Something he could fix, and fix me in the process. He removed the obvious, but it still hurts. It’s easier to be mad at him about that, now that he’s not comatose.”

“I know what you mean,” Alex says softly, with his two shoes stacked one on top of the other. 

Max is probably capable of repairing the damage to Alex’s leg. Once you bring someone back from the dead, regrowing a limb’s like a stroll on the beach. But Michael doesn’t say that out loud because he thinks Alex would never speak to him again if he voiced it. Because that’s part of who he is now, and part of how he got here. 

“Max had it wrong, as usual. Even if I wanted to undo any of that, I can’t. I don’t really want to. For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction. When things happen to us, we change. We have to.”

“That’s physics,” Alex almost whispers. 

“You got it. Doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. It just is.” 

The wind whistles over their heads. Someone will probably come along to ask why they’re parked in a campsite they’re not paying for but Michael can’t bring himself to care. 

“I think I’ve been trying to separate the good things from the bad ones,” Alex says, “because when they’re all mixed up it’s hard to hold onto what was good. But that’s one corner of the whole picture, isn’t it? Maybe you’re right.” 

“I mean, some day it’s gonna happen to me. I’m waiting for it. I imagine it feels pretty good.” 

“Not always.” Alex's eyes flicker down and away, then back. They're deep and dark, in the dying light. "That's what I've figured out," he says, and pauses for a long moment before continuing. "The whole picture." 

"Was wondering if that's where this was headed," Michael says. His throat feels dry and he wishes suddenly they weren't face to face. He's never been able to hide how he feels about Alex. Cover it up with something, sure, bury it far enough under bullshit. But not for long, or for good. 

"I promised I'd tell you," Alex says. "I'm trying not to break any more of those. But I just feel stupid. I was so scared so I wanted to find a reason to justify it. But I stand where I've always stood. That's what I know. Wish it hadn't taken me ten years to know that, but I know."

Ten years in between then and now is a circle, a cycle, a step towards something. 

"You said you loved me, ten years ago," Michael says. His mouth feels numb, every vertebrae in his body on fire, his hands too big and his breathing impossible. 

And Alex smiles, jagged and so familiar and painful. He nods. He doesn't seem to be able to say anything else and Michael understands that. Because he knows him. It's like a premonition; that Alex will always find a way to say it, even if it's in a language Michael doesn't understand. Leaving the country. Waging a war. Redefining a term. Telling him to run. Getting in his truck. Giving him a guitar. Nobody has ever asked Michael what he wants. 

Trust is like a balancing act; Alex has handed him something in the only way he can. His face looks like he's expecting Michael to throw it. 

“Alex?” 

He nods again, another answer without sound. And Michael braces himself. 

It’s dark now, but not too dark for Michael to miss the expression on his face. Guarded and hopefully and bracing for the defense. He knows that one inside and out because he memorized it a long time ago; Alex, leaning forward a little like he’s asking a question, with a guitar balanced between their bodies; Alex, seconds before Michael kisses him for the first time and realizes that no matter how many people he kisses he’ll never forget that one for the rest of his life. 

“Got a question.” 

Alex is waiting for what he’s going to say next. Michael doesn’t know exactly, but that’s alright. Flying by the seat of his pants has gotten him this far, anyway. 

The future looms out in front of him, impossible and wide. Like a canyon, 227 river miles long and 18 miles wide and one vertical mile straight down to the bottom, carved into rock by water over the course of 6 million years. 

Two feet out in front of him, Michael jumps. 

“Do you want to go out? Sometime?”

There’s a silence. 

“It’s this thing normal people do when they like each other. Drinks, or dinner, small talk about how annoying my siblings are or how much you hate your job. Kiss goodnight, if it goes well.” He’s started talking and he can’t stop. His heart is beating so hard it hurts. “You know, that. Do you want to? Not right now but - when you’re ready?”

Alex catches him.

“Yes,” he says. “I’d like that. Maybe Tuesday? I think I’ll be ready on Tuesday.” 

Michael grins. He can’t help it. 

“Okay,” he says. “Why Tuesday?” 

“Why not?” Alex bites the corner of his lip. “But if you don’t want to wait for that part at the end, you know, we could skip to that now. I mean, if you want.” 

“What is that supposed to - “

Alex kisses him. 

He doesn’t know why that catches him by surprise, but it does. Alex puts his hand on Michael’s shoulder, then his face, and then he kisses him. His face is cold, and his mouth is warm, so Michael’s mouth is warm and then cold again when Alex pulls back.

“That,” he says, “is what I mean. For clarification.” 

“Think you better,” Michael says. 

“Alright,” Alex says, and he kisses him again. Slowly and with great care and the kind of focus of intent Michael has come to recognize as being Alex Manes’s hallmark for everything. It’s something that’s been refined by a decade of hard work and slow-grown confidence; he sets his mind to something, and he plans it, and maybe it takes a long time but in the end he executes it like a masterwork. 

Alex kisses him like that. 

And the Michael pushes it, opens his mouth to chase warmth and something on the edges of that control, and Alex kisses him like he’s seventeen and dizzy with the thrill of it. Michael doesn’t know which he likes better. He doesn’t have to choose, so it doesn’t matter. 

Somewhere in there, Alex starts laughing. It seems to come over him suddenly - “Sorry,” he gasps into Michael’s mouth, “I’m not laughing at you, I’m not - “ and once he starts he doesn’t seem to be able to stop. He puts his face into Michael’s neck to muffle the sound. 

“You gonna share with the class?” Michael cups Alex’s ear. Alex looks up at him, eyes bright.

“I was just thinking,” he says, “all of your altruistic talk about change and impact and Newton’s Laws and we still ended up making out in the back of your truck in the middle of nowhere. Where we started.”

“I’m attached to this truck,” Michael says, in the truck’s defense. 

He breathes out. Alex breathes in. When he turns onto his back Alex follows, and his shoulders are strong underneath Michael’s arm. 

“I know,” Alex says. “Sometimes things come full circle, too. And that’s not a bad thing either.”

Michael thinks about whatever powers in the universe look down on lovers, and losers, like Michael Guerin. He’d assigned it malice once, but now he thinks it’s something more like a balancing act. Every action, an equal or opposite reaction - oldest story in the book, in a way. Except for the one, of course, about two atoms in a big, frightening sea that choose to stick together even when it seems impossible. 

Above them, the stars wink in the vast Arizona night sky. 

There's a next, to this. Michael's mind cycles through the possibilities. A conversation, sex. More than once, for each. But he finds he doesn't want to rush there, even knowing that it's waiting.

They watch them together, until the cold really sets in, and then Michael follows Alex into the cab of his truck, and back onto the road, and towards home. 

**Author's Note:**

> i'm leescoresbies.tumblr.com - please leave a comment or drop me a line if you liked it. 
> 
> a couple of notes:  
\- i wanted to write about the southwest the way someone who lived in the southwest can. so, i sent these two to my hometown. all the places mentioned in this story (with the exception of the cave with the alien tech and the coordinates) are real places. 
> 
> \- los alamos, new mexico, is a very beautiful strange spot with a weird military history. you can drive right into it by accident, and you've got to show identification to go through town. 
> 
> \- i don't know why i ragged on boise as much as i did. i actually love boise. it's a great cool city that doesn't deserve this - not its fault michael & alex had a shitty time there. 
> 
> \- i've always loved the dynamic of friends who also casually sleep together, & i think there's great potential for maria & michael to get to that space. more interesting than whatever disservice they chucked her at the end of s1, anyway. 
> 
> \- window rock is a real spot, with a real, big hole in a rock. google it. alex doesn't mention this, but it's also the seat of government for the navajo nation, and there's a wwii code talkers memorial there.
> 
> \- i'm not native (for the record) but can relate to both alex & michael's experiences of seeing a language a part of you thinks you should understand, & having to build those connections as an adult; i'm trying (& failing) to learn both hebrew & yiddish right now. 
> 
> \- the pizza place alex, michael & lea eat at is called alpine pizza.
> 
> \- and the photo studio michael & alex visit at the canyon is called the kolb studio. 
> 
> \- you really can't park in camping spots at the canyon without seeing anyone. that's all fabricated. i'm sorry to mislead you in this way. 
> 
> \- after this story ends, they have sex in an overpriced hotel room in tusayan. and probably in the bathtub. and in the back of the truck. do with THAT what you will.


End file.
